


and in this world unknown (i found you)

by unchartedandunknown



Series: wherever i go, know that i am homeward bound [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Airships, Alternate Universe - Magic, Angst, Full Cast - Freeform, Human Experimentation, M/M, Minor Character Death, POV Multiple, Pining, Post-Apocalypse, fwb where the benefit is they share a bed (how scandalous!), mom said it's MY turn on the airship au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:55:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22577416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unchartedandunknown/pseuds/unchartedandunknown
Summary: Approximately 300 years after the end of the world, the state of the world is threatened once again and its fate rests on the shoulders of a crew of hopeful twenty-somethings....As is how the NA novels Linhardt reads goes.(In which it is the end of the world in the most casual of ways (for a second time around) and Byleth contemplates where he stands between him and the world.)
Relationships: Linhardt von Hevring/My Unit | Byleth, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: wherever i go, know that i am homeward bound [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1624525
Comments: 15
Kudos: 24





	1. i think i shall cause problems on purpose

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up to miiind the tenses, we’ve got several povs going on here

So, dragons. Cool, right? Now picture dragons without flesh, rattled bones and all. Totally radical! That’s a really cool dragon! Maybe you’d even ask for its number, talk about taxes or the latest work-related accident over coffee and laugh while you search desperately for another topic of conversation because this dragon is really, _really_ cool. One would even say: hella. And you really want to get along with this dragon.

Unfortunately, you can’t when you’re trying to dodge said bone dragon’s tail as it crashes into the side of the airship. The dragon rattles ominously in its skeletal language and Byleth doesn’t understand dragon, let alone bone dragon so he shouts, “Caspar! Dodge!” like it isn’t common sense to dodge a large, heavy dragon tail coming your way at three o’clock.

Caspar doesn’t dodge, because he’s a stubborn nut.

Caspar raises his arm, the runes wrapped around it lighting up as a green, circular holographic shield appears, flashing repeatedly as it takes the brunt of the damage of the dragon’s tail. He still gets thrown to the side with a grunt, tumbling down the airship as the dragon swoops lower. There’s an audible _crunch_ that comes with the sound of wood breaking off the side of the airship, and a woman screams.

Edelgard realizes a moment before Byleth. “Bernadetta!” she cries, already launching herself over the side of the airship.

At the same moment, a burst of colour emits from the room the dragon bit into, twilight-purple runes reaching out, whip-like, to wrap itself around the dragon’s head. Trapped, it thrashes in the room and sends the airship wobbling.

The storm clouds above them darken with an air of finality, the stench of death rising, the hum of grasshoppers.

Dorothea finises the incantation, the lilt of her voice making it sound like song, the ancient gods whispering in your ear to _let it be so_. Her eyes turn the pitch black of solar eclipses, the storm clouds rumble, and the ground cracks as the undead rise, clawing at the dragon with the vigour of one who has finally regained mobility and limbs again. They swarm the dragon’s body in a spray of dirt and decay, and when they recede back into the earth like an ocean wave’s crumbling form, they leave only two glowing red orbs in the dragon’s place.

Hubert reaches down to pick up one dragon’s eye, larger than his hand. A raven soars down to rest on his shoulder, eyes glinting with intelligence, one a burning red, the other poison yellow.

“This should do,” he murmurs, pleased.

Byleth helps Caspar up, searching for any wounds. Caspar smiles and thanks him. He seems fine other than a few superficial cuts and bruises. Caspar walks over to the edge of the airship and points.

“That’s supposed to be Big Ben, right? It doesn’t look very...big.”

The great London clock tower must have once been a thing of beauty, a testament to the creations of man.

The clock tower collapsed in on itself centuries ago, collecting dust and dirt and grime, as all things do when they aren’t tended to. There’s not a clock or working cog in sight, only the remnants of something that once was, overgrown vines swarming the building.

(For a moment, Byleth sees an overlay of images of the old London, the city bustling, people on the streets, the sound of people, alive and livingー)

Petra is at Dorothea’s side, helping Dorothea hobble toward them. Dorothea’s face is the unnatural tint it usually is after a big bout of magic, her eyes back to normal as she croaks, “Is Bernie alright?”

“I think so,” Byleth says, because if it were otherwise Edelgard would’ve returned to them already to tell them, but she hasn’t emerged from the wreck that is Bernadetta’s room. “I saw her magic, so she’s still alive.”

“Oh, good, good.” Dorothea sags against her girlfriend, who shifts her weight in a swift, practiced motion that belies the ease with which this happens.

Edelgard returns to them, Bernadetta in tow, the arms under Bernadetta’s poncho bare of the usual runes that are painted on top.

“The airship’s taken damage,” Edelgard says, her mouth a thin line of displeasure. “We’ll have to get it repaired.”

Hubert flies up to meet them, the two eyes now in two large, floating jars in a glowing vat of liquid that follow behind him, enchanted runes swirling around the jars as a protection and deterrent against thieves.

“Japan would be the best option, but it’s quite far,” he says. “I don’t think the airship will hold that long.”

“We could get it temporarily patched, and then go to the second-bestーin South Korea,” Petra suggests.

Edelgard contemplates for a moment before she nods with a purse of her lips. “That’s the plan, then. Caspar, go see Linhardt about those wounds. And Petra, make sure Dorothea gets some rest. Byleth, with me.”

She leads him to the wreckage that was Bernadetta’s room. A chunk of the room is missing, and Bernadetta mourns her half-eaten bed.

“We can get you another one,” Edelgard insists.

“It’s not that,” Bernadetta says, tugging at a stray thread from her poncho. “The blanket you bought for me is missing...”

Edelgard turns a brilliant red. Feeling like he’s intruding on a scene, Byleth starts setting up the runes, trying to think of one that’ll suit the situation at hand. The paint and paintbrush he holds is Bernadetta’s own, and he dips the paintbrush in purple.

“How about ‘net’?”

One moment she’s not there, the next she is. In the blink of an eye Sothis hovers, eyeing the ruined bookshelf and running a hand down broken spines.

_Nice of you to wake up._

“It’s not like _I_ can help in any of these situations. Might as well get some sleep.”

_You don’t even do anything._

“Being connected to you mentally and only being able to communicate with you is a full-time job I didn’t ask for.”

Byleth decides against telling her that ‘net’ isn’t a rune and begins writing the rune for ‘trap’. He writes it on a clean part of the floor, the size of his hand. The paint turns from purple to pale pink, imbued with his magic, the rune doubling in size, expanding like a balloon to surround the chunk of the room that’s missing, which should keep everything inside while draining Byleth’s energy as long as the rune stays up.

“Thank you, Byleth,” Bernadetta says once Edelgard leaves. She’s flustered, but Byleth thinks it has nothing to do with him. “Hopefully we can get to South Korea soon...but for now I’ll be in Edelgard’s room. Just sleeping! Ha ha. Not like you can do anything else in a room. A bed. Bedroom.”

“Right.”

Sothis yawns and flips over in midair as she follows Byleth out to the hall, past the other cabins and up the stairs.

“Suppose you get attacked again, what are you going to do about that?”

Byleth shrugs. With their luck, it’s possible, but with their luck, everything should be fine.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The airship creaks and groans its familiar rhythm. Tonight Jeritza’s at the helm, steering the “wheel” - a cloudy orb covered in a kaleidoscope of runes and colours that spins in his hands.

From the crow’s nest, Byleth turns away to look at the sky, a backdrop to the aurora borealis light show above as the Black Eagle airship coasts over buildings destroyed and buried under forests. Colours shift like silk rustling in the wind, purples, greens, blues shifting onto each each other and away in a sort of dance, a memoir to no one, and Byleth thinks about how Linhardt would say something like how about three hundred years ago the northern lights would never be able to be seen just on the coast of Germany. Not exactly ‘north.’ He’d talk about how rare the phenomenon was, and yet he’d trail off to rarer things, like meteorites crashing or ball lightningー

“There you go again,” Sothis’s sigh conveys a thousand feelings ranging from disgust to contempt as she drapes herself over the railing to spread herself dramatically and pose, face deadpan. “‘But oh, when will I know the tenderness of the inside of a lover’s thigh, or to kiss softly their collarbone?’ That’s what you were thinking, yes?”

“No,” Byleth says. “Just Linhardt.”

“That’s one and the same.” She makes a noise of disgust and sits up, lets swinging over the railing. She doesn’t look like a goddess, only a childーbut when has she ever looked or acted like a goddess?

Sothis flicks his head. “I can _hear you,_ brat. You’re useless at hiding your thoughts.”

“You’re inside my head,” he points out, which she intentionally ignores.

“You need to deal with that boy sooner or later,” she continues. “At this point, it hurts to see you two together.”

He knows what she’s talking about. How could he not?

But at the same time, he has no idea what she’s talking about.

“You are hopeless,” she sighs.

Byleth’s phone rings before she can say anything else, and he fishes it out of his back pocket.

“Speak of the devil,” Sothis mutters when she sees the caller.

Byleth accepts, and Linhardt’s face pops up. He looks like he’s in his bed, the lighting dim and behind him, shrouding his face.

“You could’ve just come up here if you wanted to see me,” Byleth says.

Linhardt yawns and rubs his eye, his arm lined in weak light from the green ‘glow’ runes stuck on the ceiling. “Oh, but that would mean leaving my room, and it’s so much easier to just call. It’s a little funny, how everyone I know is just a call away, in a device the size of my hand.”

“Yes, funny.” Byleth clambers out the crow’s nest and gravity takes him as he falls, catches himself at the last second with the runes that he summons at his feet. “Are you going to sleep anytime soon?”

“That’s why I was calling you.” Linhardt holds up a book, too dark for Byleth to see the cover. “I finished _The Last Olympian_.”

Byleth opens the hatch and descends into the main deck, cold air and the hum of magical energy thrumming throughout.

“Are the gods still assholes?”

Linhardt’s laugh is too beautiful to be captured behind a screen. “When aren’t they?” Ahead of Byleth, Sothis sticks out her tongue in a remarkable display of maturity.

Linhardt’s room is the fourth door on the left, and Byleth knows it better than he knows the room he was given, which is further down at the end of the hall on the right.

Linhardt’s room is as scattered and cluttered as his thoughts must be, because that’s how Byleth feels every time he enters; clothes take up space on the floor instead of the small wardrobe in the corner, while the wardrobe has books stacked miles high and plants placed haphazardly on top, scratching the ceiling, even though Linhardt’s terrible at taking care of himself, much less _plants_.

More books clutter the floor along with notebooks and rolled-up posters of the 21st century Byleth’s never seen. His ceiling’s covered with runes shaped like stars, pulsing faint green as Linhardt rolls over in his bed at Byleth’s entrance, already buried under the covers.

“You’ll need glasses if you keep reading in the lighting,” Byleth warns as Linhardt puts down the last book in the _Percy Jackson & The Olympians _ series and ends the call.

Linhardt hums thoughtfully. “I would look good with glasses, so I don’t see any downsides.”

He doesn’t know about the struggles of never having clean glasses or having them fog up in rain and other weather phenomena.

(And then Byleth has to wonder where he got that information, because he’s never worn glasses.)

Byleth sleeps with Linhardt often enough that his own belongings blend in with Linhardt’s, in slightly better organization; the watering can he uses to water the plants is on the bedside table, shaped like a strange red plant with white polka dots and a gaping mouth filled with sharp teeth that Linhardt insists used to be in some video game in the 21st century that Byleth doesn’t care to confirm, clothes folded neatly on the one plush chair in the room that looks like it should be paired with a vanity but none in sight, and Byleth wonders as he changes if he occupies Linhardt’s mind as much as his presence occupies his room.

Climbing into bed with Linhardt and sleeping beside him is the most natural order of events in the world for Byleth. Linhardt adjusts himself to make space for the two of them on the bedーimpossible, it’s only meant for one person, so they fit like the most imperfect of puzzle pieces that weren’t meant to click but did.

“Good night,” Linhardt says, voice light, eyes already drooping, and Byleth knows the next morning he will wake with hair in his mouth and drool on the pillow or on the floor because either goes with Linhardt.

Sothis whispers, “Hopeless, the both of you,” in a fond yet exasperated voice, and Byleth closes his eyes.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The sand was painted in the blue of the moon, and Linhardt reached down to touch it just to make sure he was still grounded on earth and not on the moon.

Behind them on the airship, Jeritza saluted them, a shadow in the air.

“We have a few hours until this place sinks,” Edelgard said.

“Three hours,” Petra predicted, eyeing the glass architecture around them carefully.

“If you find anything strange, send up a rune or call.”

“No mourners,” Dorothea said.

“No funerals,” Linhardt replied, because he was the only other one among the crew who read the _Six of Crows_ duology.

It was the strangest call they had yet when the villagers informed them that one of their explorers had caught sight of a strange building in the middle of the desert. They thought at first it was a mirage, but discovered it was a glass castle in the middle of the desert, sinking fast.

A glass castle. There could be anything here. Linhardt flexed his fingers experimentally and put out his hand, the rune for ‘glow’ lighting up within his hand like a flickering green candle lighting the way as he travelled further inward, the floor slanting slightly up in a slight incline, the castle being buried sideways.

The halls were empty and cold, a draft coming from where they had arrived from a hole in the ceiling. Buried under sand there was only darkness, and Linhardt could see faint cracks in the glass and shivered and hurried forward, hoping it would hold long enough.

(Long enough for what?)

Time slipped away as Linhardt searched through the other rooms - all eerily empty, as if they had been cleared moments before, or had never been full in the first place, and shivered in the face of it.

There are no grand libraries waiting to be discovered, no buried treasure hidden away, and Linhardt arrived at the last room feeling slighted at the fact that he had found nothing in a castle so mysteriously large.

That all changed when he opened the last door.

The walls were bare, white as the bones of a disinfected skeleton. Linhardt’s eyes were drawn to the middle of the mostly-empty room and the one thing that filled the void.

A man lying on an uncomfortable-looking marble stone table inside a glass case.

Not dead, Linhardt confirmed as he drew close enough to see the vibrant colour of life in his cheeks, the petal-pale of his lips, hands laid across his body like he was dead.

Linhardt would think him a prince in those fairytales, except that he was dressed in a loose white shirt and pants with the number _62_ stitched over his shirt, and aren’t the princes supposed to do the saving?

Unless _Linhardt_ was supposed to be the prince in this situation? Linhardt laughed quietly at the thought and phoned Caspar.

“What have you found so far?”

Caspar sounded disgruntled. “A recipe book. Just a _recipe book_ , in the middle of the roomーare all the rooms empty?”

“I thought those were just my rooms, but you too, huh?”

“You didn’t find anything, then?”

“Oh, did I find _something_.” Linhardt’s voice turned smug as he moved the camera to the comatose man. “Check this out.”

Caspar’s jaw dropped and his face formed the physical expression of an exclamation mark. “No fair, Lin! Hold on, I’ll call Edelgard, don’t open it.”

“I wasn’t planning to, but now that you say it...” What could go wrong?

“Don’t be stupid. Linhardt, no.”

Linhardt said decidedly, like a king commanding an army to war, “Linhardt _yes,_ ” and disconnected the call.

The glass case was slippery. His hands struggled to find purchase before he finally found a catch, and pulled it up.

A wind stirred from inside the case, and the world exploded.

Linhardt wouldn’t forget anytime soon, because it looked like one of those documentaries they shot a long time ago, back when humans were interested in the outside world, or going further and beyond.

(They still were, even now.)

It was a supernova-level explosion that occurred within the room; the air was sucked out of Linhardt’s lungs with a forceful, gut-tugging wrench, the heat and blue-yellow blinding light emitting from the centre of the room searing through his eyelids, an audible _hum_ in the air that felt like the beginning of an end to something.

(He forgot that supernovas, as cataclysmic the explosions are, signify the end of a star’s life.)

When he came to, it was only in brief moments as his mind struggled to capture what happened, lungs heaving, struggling to take in air. He found himself staring at the stone table. His back was pressed to somethingーthe wall. His back was pressed to the wall he had been thrown into.

And struggling, through his blurred vision, was the man. He was gripping the table weakly, looking as sickly as Linhardt felt.

He went down, among the shards of glass from the shattered case, and Linhardt couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

He sunk into darkness.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The Bermuda Triangle is made of fire that burns a sadistic purple, licking hungrily at their heels as they descend. The sight makes Kronya positively gleeful. There have been storms and wrecks, airplanes and ships said to have gone missing in this space, but never this.

Never what they are about to do.

“This,” she declares, her conviction making it sound like destiny, “will change the world.”

“It will end it,” the man beside her says, shrouded in darkness that seems to pull at the very seams of existence around him. It’s like standing near a bottled-up storm, and Kronya soaks in the energy. “Are you prepared for the final step?”

She resists the urge to burst into cheer. All week, all _month_ they’ve been so secretive about the final step to the process of summoning _him_. And she was born impatient.

“Yes,” she says, trying to contain her smile, but she can’t help it. She wasーwhat was the saying? _Born ready._ Impatient and ready.

“That’s good,” he says, and with lighting speed, stabs her in the chest.

It’s a testament to her willpower how her runes don’t give out beneath her sending her to burning waters below, but it’s a near thing.

The dagger leaves her chest smoothly, the wound bursting, and she slumps over, staring at her chest, feeling the wound. There’s blood on her handsー _her_ blood on her hands and there’s _too much of itー_

“Why?” she chokes out. She can taste the blood in her throat, rising like bile.

“A sacrifice was needed.” His voice is cold and resigned, miles away from where they are now.

The dagger in his hands is coated with her blood, the blade made of pitch-black metal that absorbs the light around it. The blood drips down into the fiery sea that licks it hungrily and sings at the taste. _More,_ it demands.

“I’m sorry, Kronya.”

“No, you’re fucking not,” she spits, trying to cover her wound with her hands. “Don’t try and lie.”

A pause. “I suppose not,” he says, and like the storm he is, dissipates into the air.

The world starts to glow around her, the black of the runes they had placed just yesterday, the summoning circle they prepared.

And she is standing right in the centre of it all, a trap of her making.

The thing that rises from the depths of the sea is the creator of black holes, absorbing light and heat. It overwhelms the senses with its cold.

 _Congratulations,_ she thinks to herself sarcastically. _A first-class viewing to the end of the world._

The darkness takes its first victim without hesitation and screams in its unearthly tone, _More._


	2. many thoughts, head full

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The [playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6oUAg7KNw9c7eBGkohXg0y?si=3tqevUIWRTC6jtubANgFMg) I was listening to, which isn’t technically a fic playlist but just smth that fit my mood

It’s a summer’s rainy day when she leaves the window open, a warm breeze stirring the sheet music on the stand. Byleth stares at the back of a girl who he should know but doesn’t, looking at her looking outside the window at the empty track grounds.

“The humidity’s going to be bad for the instruments,” he finds himself saying, not really understanding what he’s saying, not even with the harp between his aching fingers and the notes along the sheet he’s been practicing pressed into his memory.

The girl shuts the window with a resigned sigh and turns, glasses half-fogged. Unbothered, she takes them off, hooks them on her uniform and takes her place in front of her stand, violin and bow in hand.

Byleth waits to follow her lead, and she hesitates. He knows she will hesitate, has seen her do it before. He knows he will ask, “What is it?” and she will respond with, “I forgot to bring an umbrella in a flat voice that doesn’t echo in the classroom.”

And he will say that they’ll talk home under the umbrella he remembered to bring together and she’ll nod, the violin returning to rest under her chin as she breathes in preparation.

Byleth will follow her cue, and the music will flow naturally as it always does, from violin and harp, from the pounding of the rain and the beat they keep with their feet, sounds waterlogged like he’s hearing it from underwater.

Because this is just a dream.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth usually wakes first, so Linhardt’s eyes isn’t what he expects to see when he wakes.

Linhardt blinks back at him, eyes alert. He must have been awake for a while, maybe just watching him in silence or thinking.

“Same dream?”

“Just the one,” Byleth says. “What time is it?”

“Early enough that I’m not getting up any time soon,” Linhardt mutters, burying himself under the covers once more.

Byleth hums and stretches, joints popping audibly because he is 24 going on approximately 324, and whoever said being old was easy?

The morning is always a careful affair, filled with an elaborate silence as Byleth forces himself out from under the warmth of Linhardt’s covers to change, untangling limbs in the process. The weight of Linhardt’s gaze is always fleeting as he changes into his clothes - fitted black pants and a large white cotton shirt with large sleeves patterned with pink that he tucks in loosely - coming and going like the light of the moon or a flitting hummingbird’s indecisiveness.

And Linhardt eventually rolls out of bed as well, and they are two planets aligned in this room, existing without interacting, the gravitational pull of Linhardt’s force an unbearable tug as Byleth sneaks glances at Linhardt’s figure as he changes into his long green pleated skirt, the white shirt with the useless front breast pocket that he tucks into the shirt, the green sweater he pulls on. He brings up his arms to tie the white ribbon, a practiced motion he’s perfected without a mirror to bring his hair back, pinning golden earrings into his ears.

Linhardt always leaves his boots untied. They’re dark desert brown, with a square toe and a square heel, the lacing up the foot so elaborate it looks like something that belongs on a corset. Byleth has to wonder why he bought something with so much lace involved if he’s too lazy to tie it in the first place.

Someday, he wants to get close enough to tie those laces for Linhardt.

But for now, he will sit and bask in his presence while he has the chance, before everything ends, whether it be by circumstance or destiny or outliers Byleth can’t predict because the world no longer makes sense, and maybe it never did.

Maybe it doesn’t have to, as Linhardt stands and looks him in the eye, two planets with the same gravitational pull, and they leave Linhardt’s room to walk up the deck without so much as a brush of their hands along the way.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They make a pit stop to gather supplies, their airship parked up top overlooking the valley. They draw lots, and Byleth finds himself with the task of guarding the airship for a few hours.

The city is made of what should have been quaint little houses and elegant chapels organized in neat little rows, but it’s hard to see the colour of the roofs when there appears to be a forest overtaking the whole place.

Linhardt leans beside him in the railing, sweater rolled up his arms. He was the first to return after scouting the place, reporting that no civilians had appeared but, most importantly, that no books of importance were found.

“The Palanok Castle used to be here,” he says, pronouncing every syllable in _pa-la-nok_ carefully. He nods his head at what the airship is floating above. “It was supposed to be a tourist attraction, known for being built on top of an ancient volcano.”

That does explain the volcano they’re floating above, not a fortress in sight. It must have been destroyed, if what Byleth thinks is true, and the volcano burst and destroyed the fortress and some of the surrounding area.

“It really goes to show,” Linhardt murmurs.

“What?”

Linhardt’s sigh is accepting as he props his head on his hand, eyes on the supposedly now-dormant volcano below and the city stretching beyond, mind ever-stuck on the mysteries of the past.

“No matter how much humanity tries, nature always wins.”

Byleth thinks there’s nothing wrong with that, and as Linhardt’s lips curl into a small, derisive smile, he thinks that he must be thinking the same thing, too.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


A few nights into their journey and Byleth is wondering how the world can exist when it seems like they are the only two people left in the world as Linhardt walks carelessly, strolling past the ruins of a crumbled city and overgrown roots of towering trees that reach for the dancing stars above them. Fireflies light their path, trailing behind them and filling the gaps within the darkness.

Linhardt’s hands move animatedly, brought to life by passion and wonder as he gestures to the phone in his hand, blasting the song of a woman long gone from this world singing about how her life almost ended in a plane crash as she pondered on past lovers and her existence.

“They’re digital footprints we have access to,” Linhardt says, arms spreading wide like wings to the world around them. “Thanks to the internet and the fact that in the 21st century, people were notorious for posting their life in pictures, captions, tweets. Maybe they thought it wouldn’t matter in the long run, but here we are, trying to piece together the past and combing through records of the world before. It’s like being surrounded by digital ghosts, or wandering through an internet graveyard.”

“I thought you didn’t like ghosts,” Byleth says, to which Linhardt laughs because he _didn’t mean real ghosts, obviously._

Linhardt has a way of making the world bigger than it feels to Byleth, peeling back layer by layer like a tangerine. A firefly lights his face and his eyes are brighter than the stars themselves, that of a comet soaring full-speed, leaving Byleth on his tail.

And as they wander the ruins of an ancient civilization, finding the empty husks of movie theatres and restaurants, Byleth wonders, as a firefly lands on Linhardt’s waiting hand, if the whole world was like the musician whose voice was captured in song, reflecting on themselves as their world ended.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Linhardt woke stiff with a headache, and wanted to go back to sleep immediately. Unfortunately, the headache was pounding, insistent, and he forced his eyes to open at the sight of his room’s ceiling.

His groan brought Caspar to his side, there and gone in an instant, calling outside his room.

“Linhardt.” Edelgard’s voice was soft yet solid, her hand on his arm a weight that brought him back from sleep’s edge.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine.” He managed to sit up with some difficulty and help from Caspar, his hand on his back. “Whatーwhat happened?” All he could remember was the explosion, the young man falling to the floor, and darkness.

“There was an explosion that shook the whole castle,” Edelgard said. “The glass broke, and we had to rush everything out.”

“Was thereーdid we find anything?” Caspar gave him a glass of water that he drank gratefully as Edelgard placed something on Linhardt’s lap.

“The recipe book I found, a harp Petra found in another room that was inside a glass caseー” _Like the man,_ Linhardt thought, and Caspar, knowing what he was thinking, added, “ーand the man. We managed to rescue him along with you once we found you.”

That’s good. “Has he woken yet?” Linhardt picked up the book Edelgard placed in his lap, titled _Seiros’s Cookbook_ , the cover made of old dark brown leather. A personal belonging, then. Linhardt held it up to her questioningly.

“You were unconscious for a day,” she said. “The man with you still hasn’t woken. Meanwhile, Petra and Hubert decided to read through this cookbook, but...”

“We don’t think it’s a cookbook,” Caspar said. “Midway through, the text changes, and there’s no more recipes. Look, hereー” He flipped to a page, bookmarked by a pressed petal of a sunflower. The pages crinkled in his hands, aged by time without being cared for.

Linhardt blinked, focusing on the words written in ink, like notes in a diary.

_Subject 01_

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


She packs up the last of her belongings in her suitcase, even though their father told them they wouldn’t have to bring anything and everything would be provided for them in the facility, her eyes on something outside.

“How much do you bet we won’t see this again?”

Byleth moves to stand beside her, taking in the view of their small apartment, and finds her staring at two cats perched on a railing on the apartment opposite theirs, cleaning each other’s fur.

“Can’t be that long,” he always says. “These guys are just calling in a favour our dad owed them so, a week? Two?”

She hums, a habit they share, and turns to roll her suitcase along the wooden floor, bumping into the couch, chairs, kitchen table and wall along the way.

“Let’s just get this over with,” she says, and Byleth finds himself agreeing. It won’t be long until they return to their university life, to fast food and store-bought noodles and the only thing on their minds is music theory and scales, though he doesn’t know why that is.

Because he’s dreaming this all in an airship miles away from the ground and there’s no such thing as fast food in the future.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Three weeks has the Black Eagles airship arriving at their destination with all the slumping relief and exhales of an end to a long journey.

They follow the Cheonggyecheon creek, which Byleth knows through repeated retellings from Linhardt that the stream was man-made for a space to socialize in downtown Seoul, South Korea but now floats above air and buildings to defy gravity in a way liquid shouldn’t but does.

The centre of Seoul - or what the crew considers the heart, the soul, really - is a skyrise building that’s been shot through by a budding tree. The branches extend outward from inside the building through broken windows and peaks through the roof where it spreads, proud and mighty.

“It looks...dishevelled,” Petra says, settling on a word, the rune at her throat glowing a brief purple.

The city feels like it’s been torn from its roots. On the ground floor, Byleth can sport destroyed food stands and abandoned bikes, more trash than is normally seen scattered throughout.

Hubert’s eye glows, the loss of the raven on his shoulder an odd sight but no doubt scouting ahead for them.

“The city appears to be fine,” he informs them. “Claude is waiting for us on the roof.”

And he is. He’s a small dot from the airship, but as they approach Byleth begins to make out his hand waving up at them, the glass-green of his eyes.

Jeritza parks the airship on the side of the building as they descend. Claude looks a bit frazzled when he sees them.

“You guys got good timing,” he says cheerily. “A tornado blew in just yesterday.”

“Are the civilians okay?” Edelgard asks.

“Yup. Marianne predicted the forecast a few days earlier from the wind currents and the birds, so we managed to evacuate everyone in time. Now it’s just cleanup. But enough about the bad news, because I have more!” Claude claps his hands together once crisply. “We got a video from Yuuei just a few hours ago, and apparently the world is supposed to end next month.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- The Palanok Castle is located in Mukachevo, Ukraine  
> \- The song they were listening to while walking around town with the fireflies: Last Words of a Shooting Star by Mitski  
> \- If you know of bnha you’ll know that the school in the anime called UA/Yuuei. That’s bc bnha is part 1 of this series, but I never got around to posting it bc I’ve been stuck on writing the fourth chapter since uhh. 2017? More on the kids in the next chapter bc they're featured 3 times throughout bc I said so


	3. the writer gushes about characters you aren’t attached to

The screen shakes as a boom resounds from within the recording. The screen steadies as the person holding the camera manages to keep it still. A girl squawks, “What was _that_?!” followed by another _boom_ , this one closer.

The person rushes to the edge of the airship, and what greets them is the sight of an island burning, but that isn’t what they zoom in on. They instead fixate on the shape rising from smoke and ash and flame. Large molten rock, cracks in the surface showing veins made of lava and fire, two eyes opening to show an endless abyss. The camera wrenches away from the eyes, trailing to what appears to be a human body, head attached to neck and torso and limbs.

“The fuck,” a boy says, blond and spiky-haired, his back to the camera. Another blond boy turns to the camera.

“Not to, like, say something stupid, but do you think, uh. How big would the size of that thing’s dick beー”

Noises of disgust rise around the boy. A girl boos loudly offscreen.

The recording fades to be replaced by a boy who sheepishly tugs at his lip, wearing a shirt that says ‘suit’ in kanji.

“Uh, yeah,” he says eloquently. “That’s it.”

A pause, before the person behind the camera says, “Izuku.”

“Yeah?”

“You need to actually. Explain.”

“Oh, right.” The boy’s face scrunches up like this is a foreign concept. “We were on the coast of Australia - what _used_ to be Australia, the place is inhabitable at this point - ‘we’ being airship A of Yuuei, when we saw thatー _thing_ rise out of the eternal fire. I’d say it was about 500 feet tall. Made out of molten lava, it looked like. We weren’t able to fight itーor, Kacchan tried to but he never got the chance. I don’t think it noticed us while it was just standing there, so we were able to escape safely, but we had no idea what it was. We’ve decided to call it a titan, though, for. Obvious reasons.” He laughs nervously. “Uh, I think that’s it? Submarine B has made no reports of anything similar to this, but we’ll keep an eye out. If you have any information about this titan, please tell us as soon as possible. Thank you!” He bows.

The cameraman’s hand appears in front of the screen in a wave as the boy says, flatly, “Byeee.” The video ends abruptly in darkness with his hand covering the lens.

Edelgard pinches the bridge of her nose in the silence that falls. “This was...an official video from Yuuei?”

Claude laughs awkwardly. “It’s hard to believe, I know. But some of them aren’t even in their twenties, and that’s how most of their videos go.”

Japan was ruled by a tyrannical king for over a century. But eighteen years after his third son was born, the son overthrew him with the help of his siblings and Yuuei, the city underground that had been working against the king. They abolished the system the king had formed and after that, Yuuei’s influence spread and rippled throughout the world.

In the span of two years, countries that lost contact without each other centuries ago now message each other regularly. Groups were made to aid towns and cities worldwide, more airships were built, the world flourished.

“I can’t the top company leading in aerospace technology is led by a twenty-year-old,” Linhardt mutters, which about sums up the brilliance and terror of the ones in Yuuei who fought against a very real army to free their country.

They’re also all younger than Byleth (and the whole crew in general), which makes him question briefly if life is worth living if you’re not overthrowing an unjust system to free the people by the age of eighteen.

“This titan is one of those mentioned in the prophecy?” Hubert asks, not wasting any time getting to the point.

The silence that falls over the group is stifling. It settles on Byleth’s chest, and he knows that for once they aren’t looking to their captain, but to him.

It’s one of the crueler things he doesn’t like to think about; how his fate was preordained, gone and done without his permission. Even Sothis, hovering in front of him, looks sober in the face of Hubert’s question.

Claude, in his careful yet lighthearted tone says, “We think so. For now, we’re going to travel there and see what we can do about the titan, but...”

Byleth knows what it means when he trails off. They’re all waiting for him, and he doesn’t know what to do.

He walks away from it all.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Linhardt sat at the man’s bedside, waiting for him to wake. According to Dorothea, who had been watching over him, he hadn’t woken once. The measly light from a lamp barely provided Linhardt a proper view, but the man appeared to be in deep sleep, which, is what Linhardt could glean from the “cookbook” was right, this man had been asleep for over three hundred years and continued to sleep immediately after waking, which, mood. Big mood.

So Linhardt focused on the book, flipping page after page for the sake of flipping it, the words blurring on the page because something in him wanted to throw it in a fire, which said a lot considering Linhardt’s habit of hogging every book he found.

_Subject 01, Subject 02,_ they said mockingly at the top of each page, as if they weren’t talking about people with names, people with families and futures and dreams.

People who had. Names, families, futures, dreams.

Linhardt jumped when a groan interrupted his thoughts, the sheets stirring. The man sat up, a certain kind of alarm on his face at the sight of another person in the room.

Linhardt held up his hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The man let out something garbled and raspy. Linhardt, trying to be careful but also not knowing how to help, gestured at the glass of water beside the bowl of paint and paintbrush on the bedside table. The man picked it up, clearly having difficulty bringing the cup to his lips with how weak he seemed to be, but he managed, and set the empty cup down.

The man spoke again, his voice sharp, not with anger but confusion, brows scrunched as he took in the empty room with only a bed. Linhardt didn’t understand what language he was speaking, but he guessed it must be Japanese.

This was the difficult part.

Linhardt picked up the bowl and paintbrush and got up from his seat, approaching slowly.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said at the sight of the man curling in on himself, like he was scared but helpless and at Linhardt’s mercy. He didn’t like it.

He gestured at his own throat, where the rune must surely be glowing. “I’m going to put this symbol on you. It didn’t hurt me, so it won’t hurt you.”

The man stared back into his face, trying to measure the trust he could put into Linhardt, and Linhardt stared back. He nodded, slow and reluctant as he tilted his chin up slightly but his eyes remained on him.

Linhardt tried to keep his hands where the man could see them, but he did need to actually paint the rune on his neck, so he settled for working quickly. Luckily, the ‘translate’ rune was one of the easiest to write.

The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed with nerves as Linhardt tried to keep his hand still to make an incomplete circle that opened at the top and a line from the centre of the circle to that opening.

“What is that supposed to do?” the man asked as Linhardt settled back into his seat and setting the bowl and paintbrush aside, his words now in the heavy, rounded tongue of Tagalog.

“It allows us to speak to each other, even without the language barrier.” The man blinked. “I can’t speak Japanese, but thanks to this rune, to you it sounds like that’s what I’m saying.” The ‘translate’ rune allowed everyone to understand each other in the language they were most comfortable speaking.

Linhardt settled into the questions he thought he should ask. “What year is it?”

“I don’t...I don’t know,” the man said hesitantly.

“Alright. Where do you think you are in the world, currently?”

“Not...Japan?” the man ventured. “I don’t...” He shrugged.

“How about your name?”

“Name...” The man turned distant, then. “Byleth?”

It was progress. Linhardt will take it.

It was with great reluctance that he gave Byleth(?) the cookbook. “What do you know about this?” He had left the page open to where the content changed to _Subject 01_.

Byleth seemed to be struggling with something internally, eyes clouding over. He shook his head forcefully but flipped the page, continued flipping through the pages, almost feverish in his endeavour.

When he stopped, Linhardt leaned forward to see his shaking finger trace over the words _Subject 61_.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth doesn’t know where he’s going, and he winds up pacing on the ground floor outside the building, scuffing up the soles of his pink shoes on grass and dirt and dust, unclenching and clenching his fists.

“You can feel angry,” Sothis says, circling him as he moves. “You have a right to, you know.”

Byleth stops at the sight of her guilty expression. It’s so unlike her to look this serious, and he doesn’t like it.

“You can feel angry, too.”

“Perhaps,” she murmurs. “Though at times, I feel like my situation is far better than yours...I did not have a life when I was brought down here, but when you...”

“I know,” he says simply. “I know.”

There’s something to be said about how at times he feels unmanned, unmoored, left adrift in a storm. There’s an ache in his heart that cannot be removed, no matter how much he tries, and he doesn’t even know where to start.

(Perhaps the aching is where his heart used to be.)

A shuffling has them looking to the building, where a figure slides out from the shadows. Byleth relaxes at the familiar shape.

“Was that her?” Linhardt asks, probably catching the tail end of their conversation. Byleth nods, not knowing what else to say. He’s the only one who can see and communicate with Sothis, but the crew knows of the invisible entity on board, and they try not to unknowingly anger her. “Tell her I said hi.”

Sothis collects herself quickly. She’s always been capable like that. “Tell him I told you to get your relationship together, because it’s an absolute mess from where I stand.”

Byleth tells him, “Sothis says ‘hi’ back.” She crosses her arms and turns away with a huff.

“I had to get away from that meeting.” Linhardt yawns. “The energy was...draining.”

Byleth can imagine. They were probably fighting over what to do. Fighting because he was too conflicted to make a decision himself. His nails dig crescents into his palms.

“Sorry,” he bites out sharply, all that sharpness directed inward.

Linhardt only sighs at the word and places a hand on his hip. “Don’t be. It makes the next step much easier.”

“What next step?”

Linhardt grins, light and mischievous. “Tell me, Byleth, what do we usually do when we’re in Seoul?”

Above them, Sothis sighs and prepares for a day filled with boredom and long-suffering, because there's nothing she can do about it.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They find their shopping cart in the abandoned parking lot where they last left it. It’s been two months since they’ve last been, so they unearth the wheels from the vines inching upward and Byleth lifts the cardboard cover they placed over it up to the side and makes an attempt at cleaning away the dirt that’s gathered over time.

Byleth can still remember the first time he landed with the crew in Seoul, Linhardt asking with a breezy smile, _Wanna run away together?_ and Byleth was prepared to say yes.

So they did.

Linhardt hops into the shopping cart that can’t contain his long legs and unbridled enthusiasm and grins like they haven’t just received the worst news of the world.

(For the world.)

“Let’s run away together.”

Linhardt’s the best person Byleth can be with at this moment, because Linhardt’s a selfish person. He’ll drag Byleth along at his whim and talk about anything that catches his interest. He doesn’t care about whether Byleth’s feeling sad, or angry, or anything. He continues to pull Byleth forward, even if it’s in the entirely wrong direction.

(At least, that’s what Byleth thinks.)

“Alright,” Byleth says, and pushes the cart forward.

Somewhere behind them, Sothis mutters something Byleth can’t make out but inevitably ends up trailing after them unwillingly.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Their first stop is a place that used to be a restaurant, the roof torn off to make space for the giant satellite dish. It doesn’t appear to be in motion at the moment, the large solar panel beside it charging itself for the night when the satellite will be in use.

A man is slouched over what appears to be the oldest technology in Seoul, a desktop computer that hums so loud it’s become a sort of background noise to the tinkering and crashes of another man hunkered over an unattached tire, the truck it’s supposed to be attached to nowhere to be found.

“Raphael, Ignatz,” Linhardt says, and the two perk up to face them.

“Linhardt! Byleth!” Raphael reaches them first from where he was sitting on the ground, catching them in a tight hug and leaving some dirt on them.

Ignatz is slower, unrolling himself from his hunch in front of the computer to join them, a small, tired smile on his face. “How are you? How’s the crew?”

“Oh, it’s been fine. Recently, weー” And Linhardt goes on to explain what happened in the past two months backwards, Byleth is content to look around the former restaurant and observe the changes, from the new pictures over on the corkboard of a map of the world, red strings interconnecting, to the new colour of a pink paint bucket (probably at Hilda’s request), to the worn dumbbells in the corner, coffee gone stale on a low wooden table, a new painting drying on the easel.

The back door opens, and in steps a woman with a snapback and a lavender sundress, bag of groceries in one hand and a yo-yo in the other. She catches sight of them and gives a small wave.

“Oh, right.” Ignatz rummages into the cupboard beneath the computer and brings out a handheld device. “I fixed it last month. It just needed some changes of the magic sort. Lysithea helped with that.”

Linhardt takes his Nintendo Switch and zips it up into the messenger bag he’s brought with them. “Thanks. How has the search been going?”

“Not a peep.” Lysithea throws a dart at the board; it lands somewhere in the South Pacific Ocean. “We lost track of them somewhere in the North Atlantic Ocean, where they vanished without a trace.”

“I meant your ghost hunting.”

“Oh.” Lysithea points to the paper-bursting corkboard on the other side of the room. “No progress there, either. I still think ghosts don’t exist.”

“Make perfect sense that you’re part of a group of ghost hunters, then.”

“They’re out there,” Raphael says, seemingly sage-like. “We just gotta find them.”

He could be talking about either board, but Byleth likes to think he’s talking about the ghosts.

Where one board is dedicated to ghost hunting - haunted houses of old, rumoured sightings, places with a history for deaths or disappearances - the other is dedicated to the Those Who Slither in the Dark, the cult that no one seems to know about, the ones who operate in darkness, experimenting with magic and runes.

The ones who ruined Lysithea and Edelgard’s live before it really even began. Byleth knows they keep in contact, sharing information whenever they can.

They say their goodbyes to the group and continue, walking past, abandoned, broken-down stores and noting anything outside the norm - a cat streaking into an alley at the sound of their approach, the school bus caught in the branches of a tree someone’s apparently made into a treehouse. Linhardt takes pictures of the fog-hidden sun and destruction of the tornado.

Byleth knows they’re getting closer to their destination when a song Linhardt calls a “classic” can be heard in the approaching distance.

The records shop is old yet cared for, with a new roof and a wide glass window that lets them see inside the mishmash of vinyl records and posters shoved haphazardly into organized shelves. Petra’s motorcycle - usually kept in the last empty cabin on their airship - is parked outside, and she and Dorothea wave at them as Britney Spears sings, _With a taste of a poison paradiseー_

They’re joined by two others; Hilda throws them a peace sign and taps gently the shoulder of the woman sitting at the table, working on constructing a miniature house. Marianne looks up, distracted, but at the sight of them gives a small smile and wave before she ducks her head again, returning to her work.

And then they arrive at the centre of the city, the hustle and bustle of the food market. Stalls are up, the noise of the people filling the streets with life, the scent of food in the air. Linhardt hunkers down into the shopping cart and takes in all the oddities around him, while Byleth remembers the first time they had explored Seoul and Linhardt had called this _the past, present, and future rolled into one._ Sothis goes this way and that, hovering over stalls and pointing at anything that catches her interest, from the deck of cards a civilians controls freely with one hand as they walk, to the bobblehead placed on the edge of a stand.

They order food from the stalls: dumplings, _mayak kimbap_ (seaweed rice rolls usually with only vegetables such as spinach, carrot and yellow pickled radish paired with an addictive dipping sauce), _jeon_ (food ranging from fish to vegetables coated in flour and egg, then pan-fried), and for dessert settle for baked cheese skewers and strawberry mochi. They pay the vendors with priceless artefacts and findings - a box of die that have as many as 20 sides, maple syrup that’s stamped to have been from Canada (and still not expired), a recipe book from Thailand - because the economy's collapsed for some time.

They encounter more familiar faces as they traipse the streets of Seoul; Hubert hovering over a fabric stall and doesn’t greet them, though his ears turn red as he looks away; Ferdinand searching carefully through books in a reconstructed library, who blisters on something about one-upping Hubert’s gift in their odd competition/rivalry/courting(?) that Byleth has been far too mystified to ask about; Caspar waves at them from a rooftop and turns away, talking to someone on his phone.

Byleth leads them under the floating river Cheonggyecheon, which shouldn’t be able to float scientifically but does, because science never accounted for magic when it came to equations and matters of gravity, so Linhardt reaches up to touch the floating river as Sothis swoops over the river so she’s just a splotch of green and pink past the water.

“You’re going to fall,” Byleth warns when Linhardt decides to stand, shaking a little as he finds his balance on the cart and reaches up with one arm to trail a hand through cold water.

“You’ll always catch me, though, Byleth.” He says it like a challenge Byleth never wants to back down from, like an irrefutable fact, so Byleth hunkers down and tightens his hold on the shopping cart.

For a moment, for a day, it is just two people existing before the world inevitably comes crashing down on them with all their responsibilities, if the world chooses not to defy gravity.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“Hot,” she mumbles.

From his view from the full body mirror at his side, he sees her roll over on the couch and unstick her glasses from where they were glued to her nose to set them on the low glass living room table. The open balcony window does nothing to cool the air, their laundry hung to dry outside blowing in the warm breeze.

Byleth screams a soft _“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh”_ into the working fan in front of his face, the words coming out choppy and rigid.

Sweat pools at his back and falls in rivulets from his neck, sticking to his shirt. It’s the hottest summer he’s ever experienced, which, according to the news casters this morning, is the record-breaking hottest in Japan.

His scream prompts her to yell, “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I~” and so begins their rendition of Whitney Houston’s _I Will Always Love You_ in the summer heat. His voice cracks audibly into the fan at the high note and hers goes soft and airy, but for a moment it lets them ignore the heat collecting on their palms and the dryness of their throats.

The sound of a door being unlocked disturbs them from their performance, heads perking up to see a large figure emerge from the doorway.

_“Hey, daaaaaaad,”_ Byleth says into the fan. Their father stares back, unimpressed.

She flings an arm out dramatically, “And I~ will always love you.” Byleth joins in, staring at their father with deadpan gazes.

Their father sighs and reaches into the grocery bag on his arm to throw a packet at their foreheads. Byleth opens his to a chocolate popsicle.

“Yeeeess,” she whisper-screams at the sight of a cherry popsicle.

Their father only shakes their heads at the childishness, cracking a small smile. “I hope you’ve got your homework done. Summer’s almost over, and classes startー”

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth isn’t sure what wakes him, but it becomes obvious at the blindingly bright light searing his eyelids. He rubs open his eyes to find Linhardt playing on his Nintendo Switch.

“Go to sleep,” he mutters, tugging at his sleeve.

Linhardt looks down at him with tired eyes. “I’m in debt,” he says. On the screen, Tom Nook stares back at them forebodingly.

“That’s why you don’t make deals with raccoon men.” Byleth yawns and stretches an arm over Linhardt’s middle. The most recent dream he had has left him feeling whiny. “Sleep.”

“Hold on. I need that...wallpaper. I haven’t seen these villagers in two months,” Linhardt says, and Byleth nods into Linhardt’s arm like he understands what he’s talking about. “My favourite villager moved, and there’s this new one in town I don’t like at all.”

Byleth is content to sit and blink through bleary eyes as Linhardt goes fishing on the beach, sells seashells and catches bugs for the museum. He doesn’t notice when he drifts off again that Linhardt names a constellation in the night sky ‘Byleth’, and he wakes a few hours before morning as the clock on the bedside table informs him, lured awake by the peaceful music playing as Linhardt’s character stands idly on the beach. Linhardt is curled up beside him drooling on his sleeve, Nintendo Switch lying unplayed on top of the sheets.

Byleth closes his eyes and goes back to sleep. The world can wait a few hours more for them.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Monday doesn’t always mean laundry day, but it does when they’re in Seoul. Byleth clips on the last of the clothes - a high-collared turtleneck sweater of Ferdinand’s - and turns to assess the state of the airship.

Clotheslines crisscross each other on the airship, from quarter deck to main mast to foredeck and back again, falling on each other and intersecting like lives on different paths. Music and laughter floats over from the foredeck, Bernadetta giggling as Edelgard spins her, the clothes lifting in the wake of their happiness and the dancing breeze.

“That idiot,” Linhardt sighs, at once indulgent and chiding.

Byleth follows his gaze to the crow’s deck, just a few feet from where they fly the giant rainbow flag, where Jeritza and Caspar stand on the crow’s deck, the former blowing bubbles and the latter unloosening the yarn of a kite bumbling its way toward the foggy sky.

“He’s always hated lightning, but he flies kites like he’s never known fear. Humans are contradictory like that, I suppose,” is what Linhardt says, but he’s looking at Byleth as he does, and Byleth gets this feeling that he’s not talking about Caspar and lightning at all.

“I guess,” Byleth says carefully, like he’s treading on ice he’s not sure will break beneath his feet. He’s the kite in the sky, struggling to fly, man-made but still trying to remember how to catch the wind.

(Byleth is not made to fly. He’s going to fall and break, when the time comes.)

Linhardt disappears behind a fluttering curtain of blue cloth with a skip and a dash of his shadow, the whisper of _catch me if you can_ following him as the last notes of Queen’s _Don’t Stop Me Now_ glide through the air, and Byleth stands suspended in time, stuck between the deliberate decision of action or stagnancy.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The shadow that fell over Linhardt was becoming a familiar one. Still, he flinched at the sight of it and paused the video to turn around to Byleth peering over his shoulder.

“Hey,” Linhardt say, noting the dishevelled hair and the shadows beneath his eyes. “Can’t sleep?”

He shook his head. “What about you?”

“Just watching old videos. Andー” He gestured at the silent night around them, the solemn flap of the sails. “What better time to watch Buzzfeed Unsolved?” Still, not the right time to talk about murders that occurred centuries ago, so Linhardt shifted the subject away from himself. “Did you need something?”

“Not really.” Byleth shuffled over to crouch under the rail, beneath the wind, curling in on himself. “Everything’s just been...a lot.”

“I can imagine.” Linhardt’s laugh was weak and faded quickly as he settled beside him. He had never been one for comfort, never knew how to comfort people properly - was it a learned trait or was it innate? - but he tried, saying, “If you have any questions, you can just ask. I know you’ve only been here for a few days, but our crew would be lucky to have another set of hands on deck.”

Byleth hummed, the sound distinct, brows furrowed, and Linhardt took that to mean he understood. “How does magic work?”

“Oh. Right, you probably don’t know. That slipped my mind. Soー” Linhardt traced an invisible shape in the ground. “Runes are their own language, universal shapes to represent an action. For example, the word ‘net’ isn’t a rune because it’s an object, but if you wanted a rune to act as a net you’d use a rune like ‘trap’ or ‘contain’, or maybe even ‘protect’.” Linhardt traced the shape into the floor, his magic trailing after the lines he made with his finger, glowing a faint green before it dissipated. “They’re like the clow cards in Cardcaptor Sakura, but not personified.”

“The what cards?”

“It’s this manga seriesーnevermind.” Linhardt waved away his question. He would have time to explain later. “There are some people who don’t need to use runes, or times when there’s enough emotion behind the command that a rune doesn’t need to be used. Sometimes, our captain - Edelgard - uses magic instinctively. And there are others who get runes tattooed on their bodies for easy access, like Caspar and Ferdinand. Caspar’s entire body is tattooed for protection, and Ferdinand has the ‘flight’ rune tattooed on his back in the shape of wings.”

“You know a lot about this.”

“It’s interesting. Here, you try.” Linhardt took off one shoe to show the ‘float’ rune on the bottom. “Try making this rune with your finger.”

Byleth hesitated for a moment, glancing at the rune and at his finger hovering in the air. He closed his eyes.

“Focus on the energy around you,” Linhardt murmured as Byleth’s hand moved. “Magic sounds a little different for everyoneーto me, it sounds like sails billowing. What does it sound like to you?”

Byleth opened his eyes when a burst of cool air came from his hand, the rune complete. It floated in the air, pale pink, before it faded.

“A whirring fan,” Byleth said, disconcerted. “Andーmusic.”

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They don’t always have time for rest. This becomes all the more clear when Edelgard sweeps into the airship, eyes sharp, the cape of her scarlet coat flowing behind her, wearing her authority like armour. “A titan was reported north of Russia,” she says, steeling for their reactions. “It’s come in contact with the Blue Lions. They’ve asked for assistance. We’re teleporting there with help from the Golden Deer.”

The Golden Deer are waiting for them in an empty clearing off the edge of Seoul. Claude gives them a salute as the shadow of their airship falls over his group, chalk marks being carved into a wide circle on the tarmac, just big enough for their airship.

The ‘teleport’ rune is not one anyone likes to use if they don’t have to. Not only is it painstakingly difficult to transcribe, it has to be done - specifically - into a circle, surrounding whatever it will be teleporting. The larger the size, the larger the circle, and the more mass it is, the more energy it saps from the person who transcribes the rune. Even Claude - ever-mysterious, always oh-so-natural when it came to magic - prefers to transcribe the runes, his own coloured runes lighting up pale blue with his portion of the circle completed.

Caspar, when Linhardt explained this to Byleth, compared it to the Law of Equivalent Exchange - “the object or goal a person will trade for must have equal value to what the person trades with.” Linhardt just blinked at his reference and continued on.

“What news from Dimitri?” Edelgard asks Claude when they descend close enough.

Claude simply shakes his head. “The call disconnected from the storm and the battle, but that was only a few minutes ago.”

A few minutes can mean a lot in a fight.

“Did you get any information on the titan?” Byleth asks.

“No, but judging by the fact that it’s Russia, I think you can guess.”

Byleth’s never had to teleport before, and judging by the unsure faces surrounding him, neither has the rest of the crew.

They park the airship within the circle and wait for the Golden Deer to finish the last of the process, different parts of the circle glowing in different colours from the runes written by different people. Claude extends his hands before him, and before he begins the spell, he pauses. “Try and contact us as soon as the fight is over.”

Edelgard nods. “Of course.” It’s a promise of their own to make it through the fight, and Claude grins at the ease of it.

Claude’s movements are river-swift, arms curving like waves reaching for the shore. It’s different from how Dorothea’s chants sound like the voices of ancient gods rising from the ground beneathーno, this is but a calm whisper, reassurance before the storm.

Byleth is given a bit of rope, and he stands there holding the end, confused, until Linhardt ties it around his hips with a tight tug.

“You may want to hold on to the railing,” Linhardt says, eyes wary in a way Byleth has never seen before. He’s wearing a thick green winter coat over his usual attire, the hood bunching around his face. “Russia’s not the most pleasant of places.”

“C’mon, Linny, it’s just a bit of cold!” Caspar says. Byleth is not encouraged by the fact that he also has a winter coat on.

Claude finishes his chant and brings his palms to the ground, eyes glowing the blue of the moon as he shouts, with the voice of a wave reaching its peak, “Teleport to the coast of Tiksi, Russia.” The circle of runes light up as a curtain of light rises and surrounds them.

Claude’s voice echoes through the mist, “Try not to get thrown around too much!” and fades into the snow whirling around them.

The cold is not a friend. It is not something he’s had to experience on a regular basis. It bites through the layers of clothing and the coat Linhardt forced on him when Edelgard first informed the crew, and he shivers and tightens his hold around himself.

When he turns around, he can’t see anyone around him through the whirl of snow. The only proof that they’re alive is the taut rope holding them all together.

The wind roars. Snow pelts his face. The sails snap, and Byleth lurches to the railing as the airship, inexplicably, begins to tilt forward.

The Black Eagle is not a warship. She does not have cannons at her side ready to be summoned, filled with gunpowder and firepower. She was made, as Byleth was told, by a small crew off the edge of Seoul who put as much care into carving the shape of the black eagle at the head of the airship as they did the rig on the sails. She was made for light travel, not war, and certainly not the worst of weather phenomena.

So when the wind fights her, she groans, and the groan quickly becomes a scream. The sails stutter and stumble and _snap_ with an audible permanency. From there, gravity does its job, and all Byleth can do is brace for the landing.

A voice shouts, weak against the wind, “I’ve got you!” A woman’s voice, far-off and lost in the wind. But Byleth feels the shake of the airship as it lands on something solid, giving into it, and he reaches blindly to wrap his hand around another’s. Linhardt’s grip is just as tight and unforgiving, shaking in its own right, but he is alive, and as Byleth reaches on the other side, he finds Bernadetta, too.

“You’ve ‘got them’?” another voice says, this one closer, tinged in vitriol. “We requested for backup, not more baggage.”

“Felix, don’t be rude, they just got here! They don’t know snow!”

“Snow? You call this snow? We’re locked in a fucking blizzard, can barely see past our noses and we’re being chased by what looks like the literal embodiment of winterー”

_Boom._

The sound echoes throughout. The world tilts sideways then back like an aftereffect of waves rushing underneath a dock.

“Tch. What did I say about airships?” _Click._ Byleth shields his eyes at the ray of blue cutting through the snow. He finds himself looking down from the airship and staring into the eyes of a man framed by glowing goggles, looking pissed at the sight of them. “Don’t bring airships to a blizzard.”

Byleth opens his mouth but Edelgard beats him to it, somewhere to the right of Bernadetta.

“You know we don’t have any other equipment, Felix. Still, it is nice to know you’re alive.” She turns the other person at Felix’s side, shorter and with glowing yellow goggles. “Where is theー”

Another _boom_ resounds, but this time it sounds closer. The sound is oddly familiar, and Byleth can’t place it, but Linhardt murmurs, “The recording,” and recalls the video Yuuei sent them of their own titan sighting.

And thenー

Byleth can’t make sense of it. It’s like a giant hand made of wind and snow reaches out to them, larger than the airship. The maw of theーthing’sーface widens to reveal a gaping darkness, and Byleth understands just how _much_ 500 feet is compared to their size.

“Oh, _shit_ ,” is Caspar’s response, which about sums it up nicely.

Something clips the titan in the side of its face, like a bolt of orange. “Eyes on me!” a voice calls, and Byleth focuses on the dot to see a man with wild red hair and goggles.

The titan roars, enraged, its voice sounding like a million shards of ice breaking into pieces. It turns with a thump and follows the man who disappears into the blizzard.

“Get down!” Felix barks. Not one for taking orders from a stranger but knowing this is not the time to question him, Byleth follows the tug of his rope down where they meet solid ground. From there he unties himself.

“Do we have a plan?” he asks.

A basic ‘fire’ rune pops up in front of him, hovering above Edelgard’s outstretched palm, shivering in the cold but eyes firm.

“You saw it. Any ideas?”

“It wasーit was made of snow and frost,” Bernadetta chatters. Byleth can’t tell if it’s from the cold or her usual stutter.

Petra eyes the rune in Edelgard’s hand. “So, fire?”

“In this blizzard?” Linhardt says.

“If we could find Dimitri, he and Edelgard could, maybe,” Dorothea says.

The swooping sensation in Byleth’s stomach settles at the sight of Sothis appearing into view.

“There’s a group of five fighting the titan,” she says. “With weapons the size of toothpicks.”

Byleth tells them this, and Edelgard’s eyes brighten.

“Dimitri’s probably with them. Let’s see if we can get close.”

Byleth takes one step to follow the others and stumbles. The woman with the yellow goggles grabs his arm. “Steady. Watch your footing.”

“It doesn’t feel veryーstable.” The ground has lurched under his feet in the oddest way.

“You’re on a ship, so it’s bound to get rocky every once in a while,” she says. “We’ve never met before, have we? I’m Annette.”

“Byleth.” Is he really befriending people in the middle of a blizzard? “What do you mean, we’re on a ship?” Is there a ship so large it can fit an airship inside?

“Ohー” A _boom_ interrupts her. “You’ll see later! We should go.”

They hurry forward, Byleth relying on Annette to guide him, Linhardt still in his hand.

“Dimitri!” Edelgard’s voice is somewhere ahead of them, voice steady and sharp in the howl of the wind.

A shadow appears above them; the hand of the titan. Byleth pulls Annette and Linhardt out of the way, landing in hard snow.

“Just leave me here,” Linhardt mumbles, clearly too tired for this shit. “I’ll just sleep.”

A _roar_ comes from the snow, close enough that the sound of the wind becomes muted in the face of it. Byleth makes out rows of pitch black, pointed teeth and eyes made of the void.

“Nevermind,” comes Linhardt’s flat voice as he rolls into Byleth.

A burst of light and heat catches their attention. Edelgard hovers in the air, a beacon of light. Beside her stands a man, a rippling blue coat to counter her red. His long blond hair is blown back by the force of their hands clasped in front of them, revealing a smouldering, inhuman blue eye, looking like it was carved out of ice.

Magic seems to split the very air between the two of them, cleaves the world in two as a fire comes to life, wrapped in red and blue, looking like wings. A head sprouts, fire spitting, great eye glittering the purple of twilight.

The phoenix parts from the two to collide head-on with the titan with a wild screech. There’s an explosion, air blown back and bits of snow and ice; Byleth shields Linhardt. For a moment there is only silence, as Byleth inhales cold air and shudders.

“Is everyone alright?” Annette’s voice calls. Off in the distance, Bernadetta can be heard fussing over someoneーEdelgard?

Felix speaks again, his voice a quiet huff when he says, “I think they killed it. Let’s go.”

It’s Caspar who pulls both of them up, brushing the snow off of them.

“Goーwhere?” Disoriented, Byleth blinks in the return of the blizzard. No shadows loom, no roars sound. The titan is gone, turned to mist and lost to the wind.

Linhardt pats snow off his coat. “‘Belowdecks’, you can call it. We can do a headcount there.”

The shadow of a large hatch opens. Annette gestures at them, and Caspar pulls them forward.

The warm air that blows in their faces sting and feels like spring. Floating blue crystals on the side light up a long hallway. The walls are made of dried mud. A shudder runs up the walls, the ground; Byleth feels like they’re inside the intestines of a warm, large living creature, but Caspar urges them onward excitedly.

Waiting at the end of the hallway next to an open doorway is a man, looking past the doorway, his back to them.

“Ashe?”

The man turns, eyes lighting up at the sight of them. “Caspar, Linhardt!” Caspar catches the man in a hug and spins him around, laugh light and freeing. Then they kiss, acting as if they are so intimately alone that Byleth averts his eyes, Linhardt rolls his, and Sothis just snorts.

They break apart in what might be an awkward minute or year, Ashe turning to them and asking, “Who’s this?”

Byleth extracts his hand from Linhardt’s the shake the man’s hand and introduce himself.

“He’s the one I was telling you about!” Caspar says.

“Oh, the one from the glass castle, then.” Ashe smiles sweetly. He makes a sweeping gesture to the doorway, revealing a drop to a small city with glowing crystals floating unsuspended. “Welcome to the Blue Lions!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Ik there are words and meanings that can’t be conveyed across languages and certain things can get lost in translation so the ‘translate’ rune basically functions as a glorified google translator but I am no linguist so let’s just assume everyone understands everyone no matter the language or I’ll suffer from the phattest headache doing research  
> \- Also I need to point out, just so this is clear to everyone, instead of flying any other kind of flag the BE fly a rainbow flag. Cheers  
> \- The Blue Lions ship is inspired by Children of the Whales, an anime with dummy thicc worldbuilding that can be found on netflix  
> \- I considered adding bnha to the tag, but considering there's no Real interaction between the two fandoms and you'll only see them in recordings I decided against it in the end


	4. absolutely sexy sexy liminal space time baBey

The Golden Deer have a permanent headquarters in Seoul that they only leave occasionally for emergencies or to go ghost hunting. The Black Eagles were formed soon after the Golden Deer was created about two years ago to provide aid to cities and towns during their travels. The Blue Lions travel to places that neither of the former two can traverse, handling trading routes and delivering cargo, travelling by sea. As such, they spend all their time in the ocean.

Byleth just didn’t think it would mean their ship would be that...big.

“How is this a ship?” he asks, eyes trailing from the people, small dots moving down below, to the houses formed out of the same mud that made the walls, the very ground they stand on. “This is an entire city.”

“The Blue Lions was made to accommodate as many passengers and as much cargo as possible!” Ashe leads them down the steps to the city floor. “It’s also incredibly fast. It’s what makes us so good at what we do.”

They reconvene with the others at the foot of the steps. Dorothea and Petra are already waiting when they arrive, and there’s another woman talking affectionately to Jeritza, the man showing a rare smile.

The stragglers arrive afterwards, Ferdinand and Bernadetta on either side of a collapsed Edelgard, Hubert following them. And behind them, the blond man being carried by a large man with Felix, Annette, a blonde woman and a red-headed man with them.

“Well, looks like the two powerhouses decided to overwork themselves,” the redhead says lightly. “Might as well throw a party in their honour while we wait for them to wake up.”

“You can all rest up here before Dimitri and Edelgard wake up,” Annette says. “The Blue Lions is chartered for the Arctic Ocean, and the blizzard should calm down once we reach it.”

Ashe leads them to what he tells them are the guest houses for temporary visitors. They walk past people going about their day; children run down the road, caught in a playful game; a woman walks by with a basket full of quilts; two elderly women play a board game while sipping tea as children watch.

The house Byleth follows Linhardt into is filled with low wooden furniture and a thick wool carpet. The bed is about the same size as the one back on the airship - meaning, they still have to squeeze into it to fit. For some reason, this doesn't bother him.

Linhardt shucks off his coat to immediately sigh into the soft covers of the bed as Byleth follows his actions, slow and attentive, watching how the stress of today rolls off Linhardt’s shoulders.

“Are you going to sleep immediately?” he says, not knowing what to expect when Linhardt takes off his messenger bag. “I was thinking you’d want to explore this place for a bit.”

“Oh, I’ve tried,” he sighs, pulling out his book - this time it’s V. E. Schwab’s _A Conjuring of Light_ \- and raising it up so he can read it while lying down. “But most of the places I’d like to see are off limits. I’ve tried to break in before, but I’ve never gotten far.”

Byleth tugs forward one of the crystal lights in the room. Its light throws itself around the room in shades of wisteria purple. Two runes glow inside: ‘float’ and ‘glow’.

“What powers the Blue Lions?”

“I’ve never figured it out myself.”

“But you have theories?”

Linhardt shrugs, and the silence stretches between them as Linhardt rolls over on his stomach on the bed. Byleth lies back and watches him, breathing slow, drinking in his presence and the warmth emitting from the crystal.

It goes without question that he’ll be sleeping with Linhardt for however long they’ll be with the Blue Lions, if only because he wants to. And because sleeping alone, especially in the room on the airship, is always a haunting experience.

(He’s never called the room his. It doesn’t feel like it is.)

He falls asleep first on top of the covers, the sound of pages being flipped and faint breathing.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They’ve escaped the blizzard by the next morning. The morning cold leaves Linhardt shivering on the upper-deck of the Blue Lions ship that isn’t actually a ship and is the size of a small island. Their airship sits comfortably on the foredeck, which had been dug out of the snow that now lay in a large heap nearby. They’ll need to change the sails since it’s been destroyed, but other than that the airship’s survived what Ashe tells them was the worst part of the journey and weather.

The Blue Lions ship doesn’t rock so much as glide on water the way a hand would part the curtains open in the morning, a quiet murmur. Out of the same mud belowdecks they construct buildings that rise up to the unclouded sky above them, little openings and alcoves serving as windows or entryways, larger than the stout little houses belowdecks.

“It’s cold.” Linhardt fixes his fluffy earmuffs around his ears and breathes warm into his mittens, the tip of his nose and cheeks a splotchy red.

Byleth breathes into his hands and brings them up to Linhardt’s cheeks. Linhardt shivers and leans into the temporary warmth. He fixes Linhardt’s hair, too, even though he knows Linhardt doesn’t care much about his appearance, more for the sake of feeling the curve of his ear and the cold of it than anything else.

And he draws away, because he won’t allow himself anything more than this, stolen moments between night and day, warmth shared for a minute, nothing more. He won’t let himself waste any more of Linhardt’s time.

(Because he is a ticking time-bomb, set to go off the moment he awoke.)

Sothis spins a slow circle in the air, eyes sharpening as she finds Byleth’s, no doubt having heard his thoughts. She sighs.

“This is why I said this was a bad idea at the start, but you clearly didn’t listen.”

As usual, Byleth ignores this, not because it’s bad advice, but he’s heard it enough already.

Dimitri and Edelgard had woken the evening following their arrival, and they had all gathered awkwardly in the room their beds were in because they weren’t strong enough to move just yet from the toll their magic had taken from them. Linhardt explained it to Byleth as a kind of advanced, enhanced version of the ‘fire’ rune.

From there, Dimitri told them of how they had spotted the titan - “We didn’t see it until it was practically on top of us, and from there we were distracting it until we could come up with some kind of plan” - to strange events happening across the world, likeー

“The Black Mist stopped by the other day,” he had said, referring to the fastest vessel employed by Yuuei and their crew. They were adventurers, the ones who scouted areas first before reporting back on whether it was safe or not. Byleth had only met them once, their crew ranging from a moody teenager to a girl with a wide smile and over-abundance of knives to a man with burnt skin along his whole body. “They told us about this strange darkness that they saw on the horizon.”

“So...the Black Mist told you about seeing a black mist?” Caspar had said.

Dimitri had only blinked at the comment and forged ahead. His one eye was a normal blue, but his right eye was carved from blue crystal with a strange rune on it that Byleth couldn’t read, and it moved independently from its owner’s other eye. Unsettling. Yet, the colour of the crystal was strangely reminiscent of Claude’s magic.

“The Black Mist said they had a bad feeling about it, so they didn’t get too close. They did follow the line of it, though, and found it to be covering a large portion of the Pacific Ocean, and it was growing.”

On that ominous note, they had left the room, the Blue Lions swapping theories of what that mist could be as they secured the passage for their cargo.

Linhardt sighs and looks out the horizon as if searching for the black mist. “Is it really safe to travel through the Pacific Ocean from what we’re just heard?”

“Probably not,” he says, but they stay anyways. _Probably not,_ but the Blue Lions are offering a passage back to the Golden Deer, and the long way round would surely be that - long.

“The Blue Lions is supposed to be the fastest ship,” Byleth says, not sure if he is trying to convince himself or Linhardt. Maybe neither of them, for they’ve both heard this information already. Maybe none of them, he revises, eyes straying to Sothis, who eyes the heavens like they’ve done her a personal disservice.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Someone has his hand and is pulling him forward in a tight grip. His lungs are tight and he feels lightheaded as his shoes slap on concrete, but all he can gather from this is that the shoes he wears are not his own, and they’re a size too big.

He stumbles on them; she pulls him up again.

“Almost there,” a voice says, and Byleth turns to see a girl he doesn’t recognize. She looks younger than him - how old is he? - with green hair coiled into two tight braids. He doesn’t know her name, but in the bright lights of the facility it’s easy for him to see the _01_ stitched onto her shirt over her heart. She looks excited, only a little fearful as she pressed onward with them, excitement building as they turn a corner to see the gates, a luminous black, wall-to-wall.

The grip on Byleth’s hand tightens. “Do you know how to open it?”

“I didn’t think we would get this far,” _01_ says honestly. “Oh, I hope it’s some kind of code. I watched a movie once where they broke into an apartment by messing with the wiring behind the keypad.”

_She_ laughs then, with all the force of a thundering waterfall, and turns to flash a smile, enough that Byleth sees the _61_ on her own shirt.

“Quickly,” she says when they finally screech to a stop in front of the metal gated wall.

_01_ rolls up her sleeves and presses a button on the number pad as it blinks to life.

“Stop!” The command is from behind, a person in an all-white hazmat suit, face hidden by lights and a mask.

_01_ pouts, deflating visibly like a balloon. Byleth gets the feeling that this is the first time they’ve tried escaping, not in a particularly desperate manner, but like it was a game, to see if they could.

“I didn’t even get to test it out,” she says, as the person grabs her arm and forces her forward, gesturing to the other two. More people in the same white attire are behind them.

She squeezes Byleth’s hand reassuringly.

“It’ll be okay,” she says, but the next time Byleth opens his eyes, he’s floating in darkness. Her voice echoes, _It’ll be okay,_ but Byleth can’t see her, or anyone, and the darkness is closing in on him like it’s a physical being. _It’ll be okay,_ she says again, voice only a whisper in his ear, and Byleth feels something cold and sharp slicing into skin, puncturing his heartー

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth gasps awake and shudders. He blinks, trying to piece togetherー _the running, the darknessー_

But he’s not there anymore, and Byleth is staring into another person’s worried eyes.

“Linhardt,” he whispers, trying to remember how he came to be clutching Linhardt’s shirt, why his hands are shaking like he’s about to come undone.

“I’m here” is Linhardt’s reply, still mussed from sleep and voice half a mumble but warm, and Byleth’s trembling slowly subsides in the face of it. “Do you remember what the dream was about?”

“I...” Byleth breathes in the scent of him and reminds himself that he is here and not _there_ , wherever _there_ is, with the whitewashed walls and piercing light. “I can’tーIーI don’t want to remember.”

It hurts. Everything hurts. There is a wound festering where his heart should be, and it tears him open every time.

“Then don’t,” Linhardt says, though they both know it isn’t that easy.

Byleth pulls closer to him, head next to Linhardt’s chest with his beating heart, just another reminder that Byleth is different from him, from everyone else.

When he dreams again, fitfully, it is only Sothis there, floating around his head and giving his hand a soft squeeze, quiet and understanding.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The roof had a gaping hole, sunlight pouring through the opening to the man wandering the wilderness inside the old chapel. Plants sprouted where they originally did not, flowers of all kinds. Vines wrapped around columns and claimed them for their own. It didn’t smell of dust and decay, but a new life.

Byleth wandered the church, hands grazing cracked pews and marble statues of angels wrapped in vines, a fallen angel among his own, the chapel now the living space of butterflies. He stopped before one angel with a harp in her hand, and Linhardt couldn’t tell what Byleth was thinking of. Two months since Byleth joined the Black Eagles, and still he was unreadable in Linhardt’s eyes.

Byleth took to the work naturally, and the crew better. He learned to rig the sails, feel for the wind, how to use magic. He got along with everyone, took to talking to Petra about weapons and Ferdinand over tea and Bernadetta on books that had caught her attention recently (whenever she could be found outside her room). But Linhardt liked to think that out of the whole crew, he knew Byleth best. This feeling didn’t come from nothing. Byleth was the one who chose to confide in him that night, and the nights after, and Linhardt would think sharing a bed would mean something of learning to understand a person.

A list of things Linhardt learned about Byleth so far:

  1. He liked taking care of things. He’s started taking care of the plants in Linhardt’s room, which was good news, because the plants would have likely died without his intervention.
  2. He liked having his clothes organized in a neat pile. In fact, Linhardt’s room was actually a bit _cleaner_ now that Byleth was there.
  3. He liked listening to Linhardt talk. Or at least, he humoured Linhardt, because Linhardt couldn’t think of any other reason someone let him talk about all the wrongdoings in the _Harry Potter_ series or the musical growth in _Pokemon_ throughout each generation for over an hour.



Linhardt thought at first that Byleth was a shooting star, something short-lived and vibrant, meant to be admired from a distance. Yet watching butterflies fluttering around Byleth, wings flashing blues and blacks, one flirting with the finger Byleth extended in open invitation, Linhardt thought about distance, and that between them it felt like miles, even if they were only several feet apart.

(And to smite himself, he took a picture of that Byleth in the ruined chapel, reaching for a butterfly under the shadow of an angel.)

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They spend the most of two weeks on the Blue Lions, weathering the cold and ice. Byleth has Linhardt by his side for the majority of it was he’s introduced to the rest of the Blue Lions crew, learning about the world they live in. Dedue tells him about the food they’re able to grow with soil that’s been manufactured to be warm and allows plants to grow without need for direct sunlight, Annette cheerily shows them the kitchen and her horrific-yet- _adequate_ baking process. Mercedes shows them the instruments made of various wood and metal and strings.

(Byleth’s eyes land on the harp in the corner and is overcome with an urge to play it, or run. A bit of both.

He does neither, and uncurls his hands before anyone notices.)

The other people on board are either civilians - people who live on the Blue Lions and work with the crew - or passengers - people travelling with the Blue Lions to a set destination for whatever reason (a restart, a new life). Most are friendly or keep to themselves. The children play with Linhardt’s hair whenever they find him, usually talking to Ashe or in the library, and the elderly accost Byleth with various tasks throughout the day if he’s willing (he is). It doesn’t feel like they’re nearing the end of times with Jeritza smiling and Dorothea laughing gently at something Petra’s said, but it is, and it only makes Byleth feel worse, like the whole world will pay if he doesn’t do anything.

(And the world _will_ pay, because everything comes in due time.)

Occasionally they’ll brush up against something at the bottom of the ship, which Dimitri tells them to be buildings sunk underwater or debris from destruction. They skirt past siren coves that have popped up and only see mermaids from a distance. The ship can’t approach the shore, so they take boats to the coastal towns. The people there are few and far in between, with even less shops. Most of the people have gone further inland, because humans are social creatures, and they follow the tide.

So of course it is on a Tuesday afternoon that the travelling bazaar pops up in one of the towns they stop by in.

Do you know of the wear and tear of destroyed buildings, or the emptiness of in-betweens like unused staircases and empty airports? There are things that make a home of those worn spaces in time, the wrinkles in reality. Linhardt calls it the neither-nor. _Neither here nor there._

But more commonly they’re called liminal spaces.

The travelling bazaar is another one of those strange places that appeared after the end of the world - stranger than most. It is never found at the same location twice, the locations it chooses cannot be estimated, and it is impossible to determine what will be inside the shop, ranging from rainbow dragon scales to cheese from the 21st century that definitely should have expired but somehow has not.

The one constant is the seller, a supposedly immortal woman who goes by the name Anna.

And the outside of the bazaar looks like a dilapidated 7/11 gas station convenience store.

A bland “Welcome,” is what greets them as Byleth enters the shop with the rest of the crew. The shelves are filled with knickknacks that should be impossible to find in a regular gas station convenience store, and the crew gradually splits off into sections as they go down seemingly endless rows, Bernadetta gesturing wildly at what seems to be _the_ Mona Lisa or a very detailed duplicate, Dorothea lifting a pair of neon pink roller skates off a rack, Caspar snorting at red booty shorts with the words ‘My bloodline ends with me’ printed white on the back.

The woman at the counter has her legs thrown up, face hidden by a newspaper, head bobbing to the song playing from the Ashen Wolves radio station.

“Awful murders, don’t you think?”

“What?”

“The Whitechapel murder. Just the other day.” The sound of a bubble being popped sounds behind the pages, and now that Byleth looks closer at the newspaper, it’s titled at the top with ‘Ghastly Murder in the East End: Mutilation of a Woman.’

Byleth doesn’t get a chance to read the rest because Anna lowers the newspaper to peer over at him, her eyes widening.

“Oh. You should’ve told me it wasn’t the late 1880s anymore.”

“What?” Byleth says as Anna wheels away behind the counter, returning with a fancy hat that looks more like it belongs on a pirate ship that in a convenience store.

“It’s hard to keep track of time here,” she says. “Did you need something?”

“This is...the neither-nor.”

She squints at him. “I wouldn’t call it that. It’s more like the ‘everything, everywhere, at every time, except in the world where it doesn’t’...but that wouldn’t sound as cool as ‘neither-nor’, would it? Huh. ...Maybe I should call it ‘neither-nor’,” she mutters.

Byleth decides to look around near the counter when she trails off, looking at a mini chess set, the Twilight movie poster hanging above, a deck of tarot cards.

“Looking for something for a friend? Family? Lover?” she asks, having dropped her previous wonderings.

Byleth’s eyes land on a fishing pole, and he ponders the logistics of buying it when they live on an airship. And then he tries to think of what to call Linhardt, because he’s not sure there’s a title for whatever their relationship is, and he’s not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Hearing this, Sothis floats over from where she was hanging over a table filled with fossils of unidentifiable creatures.

“I think I can help you with that,” she says. “It’s called ‘I’m in denial about how I feel about my friend and now I want to get him something but I don’t know what will convey my feelings, oh Sothis, won’t you help me?’ Just get a ring and call it a day.”

Byleth doesn’t think he’s in denial about anything. It’s more like he’s sidestepping the problem, which is different from denial, because sometimes he find himself drifting with thoughts of _togetherness_ and _intimacy_ and what that means with Linhardt of all people.

Together, what is that? Linhardt’s head peeks over a shelf, caught up in something else, unaware of Byleth’s eyes being drawn to him. Is it holding his hand at night, waking in the morning to him? Is it listening to him talk for hours and never tiring of his voice? Is it the way Byleth simply enjoys being included in Linardt’s life, for as long as he’ll have him?

Linhardt disappears further down the shelves, and Byleth discovers that he doesn’t know. Maybe he’ll never have time to.

Anna has returned to her magazine, no doubt deeming Byleth a lost cause herself. This allows Byleth to examine the shelves further, from left to right, up and down.

His eyes catch on a small, glittering thing in the bottom left corner.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Linhardt’s room slowly became Byleth’s own in the smallest of ways, but there were still parts of him that Linhardt wasn’t privy to.

A few weeks into their arrangement he brought it up, because he’s curious at heart, and Byleth was the curiosity his mind was set on.

(He didn’t know his heart would follow.)

“Are you sure it’s not simply because you’re uncomfortable with your room?” he said before they settled in that night, what was quickly becoming the usual with Byleth stopping by his room and never finding a reason to go and always a reason to stay.

Byleth didn’t take long to reply, only sat on the edge of the bed and didn’t look at him, in thought.

“It’s that, too,” he finally said. “The room is empty. This one is full. I like it here.”

Linhardt remembered the few glimpses he had of Byleth’s room - a bed, an almost-empty closet. The harp, in its corner, filling in the space and silence of the room with something solemn and sad, and Linhardt could only guess it had something to do with the way Byleth looked at it, like he both feared and needed it near.

“Did you ever play the harp?”

Byleth flexed his fingers and looked down at them, light creating shadows that curved over palms, and Linhardt could see for a moment phantom strings caught between his fingers.

“Yes,” he said, the most sure he had ever been of his past, and Linhardt couldn’t find it in himself to ask anymore questions, though maybe if he were younger he would persist, unknowing of the world and all its dangers, all its secrets. Because just the one question left Byleth looking drained, like the cracked ground in summer without rain.

Instead he moved into the safety of the bed, and Byleth soon followed, slipping between the space Linhardt had learned to create for him, one Byleth had learned to occupy.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


She’s distracted as she brings her hair back from where it’s fallen in front of her face, fixes it behind her ear and leans further into her book, the noonday sun leaving an afterglow on her back.

“Your posture is terrible,” he says mildly, and she only sighs after a moment and readjusts herself, pushing up her glasses though they weren’t falling off her nose in the first place, a habit.

The gesture is deemed useless when she drops her head on the table and bangs her head on it softly, punctuated with the soft words of, “I. Hate. This,” because this is still a library and they need to be quiet.

Byleth kicks once at her shin and she sits up once more, composed as always but with a severe frown as she squints at the next paragraph.

And still, he thinks of playing till his fingers become numb with the feeling of plucking strings, dreaming of notes to practice, memorizing his latest piece.

He says, “I wouldn’t trade it for the world,” because there is nothing else in life he would rather be doing, nothing else he would rather be than this.

She grins in shared sentiment.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_But sometimes the world doesn’t give you a choice, does it?_


	5. this is Ghibli propaganda

It is on the 29th of August that the Black Eagles take to the sky once more, journey completed, the Blue Lions having taken them as far as they can. They say their farewells as dawn lines the horizon in hazy pinks and oranges. Dimitri and Edelgard hug and share a whispered conversation, Annette gives sweets to Bernadetta, Jeritza hugs his sister goodbye. Caspar brings another passenger on the airship, because apparently it’s his turn to take care of his and Ashe’s cat, an orange willow-tailed tabby named Cinnamon.

“His full name is Cinnamon Toast Crunch,” Caspar announces, as if it is the name of the highest royalty. Hubert scoffs as his raven appears and lights upon his shoulder, observing the cat silently.

Their return to Seoul is celebrated by the Golden Deer; Ignatz is the first to spot them by his telescope, ever-vigilant, and they spot him as they approach, waving with both arms, seated on Raphael’s shoulders.

It is short lived when they see Claude on the same building, eyes shaded from the sun with a hand over his eyes.

“Got some more footage from Yuuei,” he says as a greeting. He’s recovered from the magic required from the teleportation circle, bright-eyed as always, only a small waver in his hand betraying any exhaustion. “It’s...something,” he summarizes, and leads them down to the lower floor, filled with outdated tech wrapped by vines and a large screen that switches on with a wave of his hand.

The screen flickers to life, and they’re on an airship again, a different one from the last recorded message. This one is black as night, waving a flag that looks like a clouded blue sky. The person recording whistles lowly and approaches the edge.

“Check it out.”

Just outside the airship a mist lingers, darker than the airship, darker than night. No light shines through it, absorbed by the darkness, and Byleth feels even through the screen that he’s getting a glimpse of true darkness. It’s a wall, hiding the sea and sky that should be behind it.

“Weird,” the person mutters, and pokes at it with a hanger. The hanger is yanked out of his hands, disappearing into the darkness. “Oh. Okay.” The camera turns to a thin man with ashy blue hair. “This shit’s kinda weird.”

The man rolls his eyes. “No shit.” He glances at the darkness, something making his eyes widen and pull the wrist of the man recording, the camera shaking with the force and speed with which he does it.

“Whatー”

“Look,” the man says, and the camera shifts to the darkness, which has now begun to move, rolling forward, reaching like hands to grasp.

A gasp comes from the darkness, like it is trying to speak, something hungry and low and growling in this voice, something that has Sothis lifting her head as if waking from a dream and leaves the room suddenly cold.

The man spits the order, almost a bark, “Kurogiri, _wheel_.” The airship swerves away sharply, the screen shaking with the force of it but still on the darkness as it moves as if trying to chase.

“Oh, _hell_ no,” the man recording says, and the screen cuts to black. When Byleth feels the cold and silence rise up to grasp at them it flickers back to life with a buzz, revealing a girl with a too-wide smile with a woman beside her.

“We almost died!” the girl says, as if delighted by the concept. The woman just shakes her head, used to this.

“The darkness chased us. We were lucky we were able to escape, but only because it stopped before it could get us. Like it was waiting, or sleeping, orー...something.”

“Wonder what kind of spell it would take to make something that big,” the girl says thoughtfully. “But it can’t have been anything good. It smelled like blood. A lot of it.”

“Toga, we don’t know if that _was_ a spell. It could have been some kind of creature, or something.”

“No, it was definitely a spell. I could feel it. And _smell_ it. The ashes.” Toga taps her nose. “Blood’s the most potent for using runes, but this one had a lot of blood. A _lot_.”

The woman glances at the screen after Toga trails off, done with her theory.

“This is Magne from the Black Mist. the recording was just...a few days ago? August 20th. We’ll be keeping watch on this weird mist until we have any answers on what this is, solutions on how to make it leave. It’s started moving out of the Pacific Ocean at this point, to North and South America. That’s kind of a rough note to end this on, but...stay safe out there.”

“And don’t die!” Toga punctuates this with a cheery peace sign.

The screen returns to a fizz of black.

Edelgard is the first to speak over the silence. “We just travelled in the Pacific Ocean, but we didn’t see anything like that.”

“They said it moved to spread over North and South America,” Claude says. “Why it decided to do that, I don’t know.”

“It’s travelling from west to east,” Sothis murmurs.

_Opposite of the sun._ Byleth doesn’t know why this is what comes to mind, but Sothis looks at him pensively and remains silent.

Claude calls Byleth over when they’re about to leave, and the two stay behind while the rest of the crew empty out the room. Byleth, with an inkling to what this conversation is about, doesn’t fret, but he stands at the edge of the room, ready to bolt.

Claude’s an enigma. He appeared suddenly in Seoul one day, and despite no one knowing who he was, was charismatic enough to gather a group to pull together a community. He knows more than he should, and everything about him is purposeful, from the way he composes himself to his side. If Byleth knows something about Claude, it’s only because the man himself decided to reveal this part of himself, and even then Byleth isn’t sure if it really is him.

“There’s not a lot of time left for you to decide,” Claude says, not insincere, but not soft in any way. “If I could, I would have made sure you never had to choose something like this in the first place.”

Byleth stands between a path that splits away from each other:

  1. He can say what Claude wants him to say, that he’ll sacrifice his life, of course he would, why wouldn’t he? He will always work for the greater good, and the greater good involves his death this time around.
  2. He can say no, he can turn and leave, escape to a corner of the world where no one can find him, though he’ll be no help to anyone like that, and the darkness, if it’s spreading through the world like it seems to be, will reach him eventually.
  3. He can say nothing.



Byleth says, “Nothing good comes from _what-ifs_ ,” just to see Claude’s face split in a grin, as if Byleth has caught him doing something he shouldn’t.

“You’re right. And with that, I think I’ll leave you to it.” Claude swipes his arm across the air, dispelling any uneasiness and the topic at hand. A few of the small screens behind him come to life, glowing electric blue. “Something tells me you’ll come to a decision eventually. You have my trust.”

Byleth would consider that a grand compliment, but Claude’s always been a believer, if given ample enough reason to believe, if he knows the person well enough.

“He’s always been a strange one,” Sothis remarks as they leave, but it’s not anything new, so Byleth doesn’t fret.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


They’re much younger when she reaches for the strings. Their father does nothing to stop her, only watches as she plucks the strings and makes notes ring into the air.

It’s unrefined, fresh and inexperienced. After all, she is only five, and her fingers wobble indelicately as the notes warble and taper off.

But when she looks up, her eyes are starlight, brimming with the excitement of discovery, something to call her own after last week Byleth took interest in the harp and plunged into the world of music, fingers unyielding as he plucked at the strings, his teacher guiding him through a scale with infinite patience.

With the might of a five-year-old deciding what she wants for dessert, she declares, “I want this one,” like she is laying down a new law for a kingdom.

Their father, as Byleth knows he will do, will talk with the cashier about the price. The violin will be packed away into a case, and she will stumble with it in her arms, because right now she can’t carry the weight of it for long (but in time, she will learn). Their father will hold both their hands, one on each hand, and carry the new instrument home.

Byleth won’t have a name for the feeling that opens up the path before them, only that it feels like prying the sun from its zenith to cradle in his hands, and the start of something new.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“Why does magic sound like that? A whirring fan, the sound of rain or music?”

Linhardt extended his hand to catch a few raindrops before retreating under the umbrella. Even still, the airship breathed, alive, damp sails fluttering and pattering with rain, wood darkened and slick.

“They say magic wasn’t meant for this world,” Linhardt said. “That magic wasn’t meant to be shaped by human hands. The Atlanteans knew that civilization was changing, and magic isn’t malleable. It works at its own whim.”

“What changed, then?” Byleth asked, eyes closed, listening beneath the rain. Linhardt closed his eyes to hear it, too; the sound of invisible sails billowing, and further beneath, the murmur of the wind blowing through clothes left to dry in summer heat.

“Nothing. They forgot that humans could learn to adapt, the same way they have for centuries.” As proof, Linhardt flashed his Nintendo Switch, made to charge without an electrical outlet and run on magic alone. But he didn’t mean the return of technology combined with magic alone. He meant runes tattooed on arms, ready to activate at a moment’s notice; motorcycles that could soar through the air; the existence of airships themselves.

And magic, he supposed, had been in play to put Byleth to sleep, to have him meet them years in the future. Was it magic, fate, or coincidence that brought them all together?

(Did it matter?)

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“People used to travel in these.”

Byleth hums in the quiet that falls in a hush over them, an unspoken _I know_ hanging in the air. The moss under his feet is soft, the plants woven between seats and up bars untouched. Linhardt moves his flashlight to pierce through what could be the belly of a beast, smothered in the darkness of greenery and shrubs that have grown over anything man-made.

There’s a sense of abandonment and quiet sort of amazement that Byleth takes in the fact that, despite everything, nature finds ways to grow without light as he brushes the petal of a purple flower poking out the untamed garden.

“Their top speed was 190 miles per hour,” Linhardt says, and the rusted train tracks whisper beneath them, as if still longing to take them to places they can no longer reach.

The trains went out of use after the end of the world. With the sudden overgrowth and outbreaks and out _bursts_ the world had thrust upon humanity, there was no time to get the system up and running again.

And yet, what did the end of the world look like?

A stream that shouldn’t exist trickles beneath them as Byleth imagines; the forecasts’ predictions turning false as the weather becomes unpredictable with change; the seas rising, splitting to reveal a hidden island; the land heaving, buildings toppling with the force of it.

And if Byleth imagines hard enough, he can feel the train rumble beneath him, alive in a way it hasn’t been in centuries, holding on to a bar as he stood still yet remained in motion as he was transported to his destination.

“Do you think we’ll ever get to use these again?” Linhardt says. “It’s a shame to abandon them now when they’ve already been built.”

Yes, Byleth thinks, it is a shame. But sometimes you have to leave things behind in order to start anew.

He only hums again, leaving Linhardt to interpret. Linhardt only smiles and steps out of the cart, investigation done, pleased with what he’s found, if he’s found anything at all. They climb out the rubble, past the fallen tiles and half-collapsed columns, and leave the fossils and sleeping beasts of humanity where they found it.

And Byleth decides, like the rest of humanity, that Linhardt and the crew will learn to live without him. The rest of the world will unfold for them to see. Linhardt will move on without Byleth at his side, as much as Byleth wants to remain at his side, because he does. He _wants_ with an aching need, and isn’t that new, this kind of ache that feels like a festering wound? _He wantsー_

ーLinhardt to wake up to the next morning, and every morning after, because that’s what mornings were made for, him and Linhardt. He wants habit to become routine to become something he appreciates, new and gradual, time and time and time again.

_He wantsー_

ーto feel time pass between them as Linhardt reaches up for the Cheonggyecheon river once again, where the fish swim against the current and the taste of strawberry light on his tongue, pushing a shopping cart that’s capable of holding his whole heart within.

_He wantsー_

ーto never say goodbye to the crew, not in any way that is final, to see the Blue Lions once more, to watch the never-ending Golden Deer debate once again on the existence of ghosts and aliens.

_He wantsー_

ーLinhardt. Just Linhardt, down to his simplest form, because Linhardt at his simplest has the stars in his eyes and the sky within his grasp.

_He wantsー_

ーbut that’s the thing, isn’t it? Want, want, _want._ It’s such a human thing. Human greed. Greed is how they got here in the first place. Greed is what brought on the end of the world. The world is calling upon Byleth to not do what all humans have given in to, and that is greed.

And it’s not fair, it’s not fair at all that Byleth’s being forced to do what so many others will fail at, but the world is never fair and it never was.

So Byleth shores up his defenses. He makes armour of all he’s had of Linhardt, from the distances between glances to his slow morning wake, from his lackadaisical smile to the hunch of his back over whatever game or book has caught his attention.

Byleth makes armour of his memories, yet Sothis’ whisper of, _Hopeless,_ pierces through it all anyway.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth was normally a quiet companion at his bedside, but tonight he settled his arm beneath his head and looked to Linhardt and said, “Can you tell me more about magic?”

It felt like they were sharing a secret, and Linhardt grinned and turned to him, never one to miss the opportunity to talk about something he enjoyed to a willing victim.

“Magic is the source of all things. That’s why it always sounds like home.”

“What does it sound like to you, then?”

Linhardt could remember the hazy summer day Edelgard happened upon them. The rain had almost flooded the city of Manila but it didn’t, leaving only mud and dirt and a sigh of relief for civilians. The airship had looked the same as it did now, but there were less members, and the toll showed with the quiet slump of their shoulders and the length of their walk down to solid ground.

They had been an odd knit crew when Linhardt first met them, made of bits and pieces of the world and brought together in makeshift harmony or catastrophe. Caspar had compared them to the cast of Soul Eater with how much they seemed to differ; a young woman who had thrown a poncho over her pyjamas as if she could fool anyone with what her plan for the day would be; another woman wearing an 18th century-inspired ball gown with leggings and heels; a man who seemed to have emerged from the closet of an emo goth kid from the early 2010s.

And Edelgard, the captain of the crew, with a wide-brimmed hat with a dramatic plumed feather and a coat that flared out as she walked, the colour of a striking dawn.

She had told the two of her plans - to recruit a crew that would seek to aid others. Linhardt hadn’t been interested in anything like that. He would much prefer a nap to any grand adventure.

But the promise of something different called, and as Linhardt had looked over the crew once more, he had decided that this could be something else, something more.

So Linhardt told Byleth that home was the snap of the sails unfurling to take flight, the creak of the airship as it sung its tune at night, and that home it would continue to be as long as Linhardt stayed, because he had left the nest without a backwards glance, ready to change, to ride the current of freedom.

The look on Byleth’s face could be described as something nostalgic, the soft furrow of his brow and the way his lips parted, lost in something Linhardt couldn’t see.

Someday, he believed, he would be able to read Byleth like a book he particularly enjoyed. And he would read the book again, and again, and again, because this was one of those books you couldn’t put down or keep on a shelf for long before it beckoned to be read again.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The rain washes away snow with the approach of spring, and she steps over a puddle, twirling her umbrella so that raindrops spray around her in an array.

Sitting on the bench at the bus stop, Byleth only watches, her violin case at his feet.

“Planet,” he says, picking up where they left off from their game of _shiritori_.

She turns and mimes the word, “Teapot.”

“Theremin.”

“Necklace.”

“Elevator.”

On an on their game goes, until the sky begins to clear into something forgiving and decidedly lavender, and she closes her umbrella and attempts to shake off the last of the raindrops and stows herself away beside him, waiting for their bus that never fails to arrive twenty minutes late but always arrives on the dot at its own unscheduled time. There is no time to waste. She drums her fingers on the bench, and Byleth feels her restlessness, too, to hurry home and force his mind to focus on homework and eat, and only after can he devote his time to what he loves most.

_No time to waste,_ she mouths, and as if in answer, the headlights of a bus appear far down the road.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The streamers line up and down the airship, to be replaced tomorrow by clotheslines and their burden. But for now, the streamers flutter about in the wind as Caspar hurries past with one end of a table, Jeritza on the other side. Edelgard’s voice echoes from the main deck, and Byleth pauses in helping Hubert hang up a streamer that refuses to stay down to peer down from the quarterdeck.

“Are you going to help, or are you going to sit there?”

Linhardt only continues with his activity of draping himself over the lawn chair, face hidden by his copy of _Good Omens_. A fitting book for the end of the world - _Armageddon_ , Byleth remembers the word rising up to loom from the quote on the back of the book - but not so much a birthday party.

“I think I’m going to sit here” is Linhardt’s response, idly flipping a page. At this, Byleth returns his focus to his end of the streamer as Edelgard goes into her spiel. On the other end, Hubert and Ferdinand are talking.

“Not to worry, Hubert, I can do this.”

“I was already planning to, no worries, I have no need of your assistance.”

“Oh, but I _want_ to help, especially after the tea you gifted me last week.”

“Ah, yes, I just happened to stumble upon it in the market, it was no trouble.”

“Still, allow me to repay youー”

Sothis gags, her loud discomfort only heard by Byleth, who turns away from their antics to the streamer once more. On the other side of the airship, Bernadetta hurriedly hushes Caspar from making too much of a racket this early in the morning.

As the sun rises, reaching for its zenith, Byleth thinks how strange it must be, to count down the sunrises and sunsets they have left when they used to slip by so quickly.

When Byleth looks around, it’s hard to tell any difference with the normalcy the light of day brings them. But he hears Ferdinand proclaiming to make this the best party yet, smile wavering because he knows this might be the last; Caspar actually tiptoeing in an attempt at silence; Linhardt slipping out of his chair, book abandoned, to help with the decorating.

Byleth finds this is not the last party he wants them to celebrate. Even with the threat of the strange darkness spreading further over continents in the world, headed in their direction, he decides he will make the time for them to celebrate and live on.

He might have decided that long before.

And maybe that means he’ll never get to see Hubert with a party hat on again, or Bernadetta hiding a giggle behind a hand as Caspar trips, or Linhardt begrudgingly holding Edelgard up as she fixes the sails.

But they’ll be alive.

So as Petra’s brought out with her eyes blindfolded by Dorothea, and they gather to begin singing ‘Happy Birthday’ as Jeritza carefully carries the ice-cream cake, Byleth resolves to keep everyone alive.

Even if the cost is his life.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Sothis pokes a hand through the strings, which does nothing but make them waver. They are on the deck of the airship again, but this time alone - or as alone as anyone can be in this small space, with most of the crew asleep in the belly of the airship. It is like that night from so long ago, but there are no northern lights here to light their way, no set destination to travel to.

“Not going to bed soon?”

Linhardt approaches him without hesitation, fishes out his phone; 11:43PM flashes at him, from a background of green and gray that Byleth doesn’t piece together quick enough before Linhardt pockets his phone.

“I thought you were too lazy to get out of bed.”

“And I thought you didn’t play the harp.” The unsaid _anymore_ floats in the air between them, waiting to be caught. Byleth lets it float away and sits on the stool he brought with him. Sothis, curious, circles the harp.

Byleth only _hmm_ ’s instead in response, _hmm_ as in _you’re right_ and _but it’s about time, don’t you think?_ and brings the harp down a little to lean on him, its old resting spot on his right shoulder.

It’s been years since he’s played, and all of the experience he’s accumulated should have vanished. But when Byleth brings up his hands to pluck at the strings, they vibrate in the air and notes sigh in relief, singing sweetly in response as if waking from a long dream. The calluses on his fingertips make themselves clear once more, muscle memory making his moves intuitive even if still a bit ungainly, like a person learning to walk after having been in a cast for months.

The song that emerges is hesitant, born out of a memory that feels more like a dream of a past life. It sounds lost, yet Byleth’s fingers pick up speed naturally because _he knows this,_ the same way a runner knows about the burning in their lungs or a swimmer’s first cold dive into water. His hands blur before him, the shadow of them on the floor of the airship as he begins again, this tune he’s always knows. _Begin again, begin again._ And somehow, it feels like both a return and departure from who he once was.

By the end of the last note that peters out in the cold night air, Byleth’s fingers are shaking from the strain and feeling of it all. He sits back, overwhelmed, grip loose on the stool, feeling spent and fulfilled. He feels like he’s laid his heart bare in the notes, in the music spun from his fingers, and it’s an odd thought, because he didn’t think he had a heart left to lay bare. Does this mean he’s still human?

Linhardt is the first to break the silence.

“That was certainly beautiful.” He looks like he wants to say much more, like he could make words out of the feelings welling inside him, but a glance at Byleth’s face makes him pause. We should go to sleep soon.”

Byleth likes the way he says it, like it’s a given Byleth will be joining him. Because at this point, whatever they have between them really is a given - freely offered, freely given, freely taken.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


He dreams again, but there is something different with how sharp the light is compared to any other dream. It doesn’t feel like a dream, or anything golden or half-hazy. She’s here again, the _61_ stitched over her shirt right over her heart.

Byleth doesn’t notice this change from the other dreams until she looks directly into his eyes. She’s never done that before, and the full force of it almost makes him look away.

“I might not make it through this,” she says, words not making any sense. “If I die, you have to make it through this, okay?”

He doesn’t understand, only that there is something unsettlingly wrong. She doesn’t belong here, not in these white lights that make her skin pale and eyes dull. Where is the rain, the sunlight? The blinding lights of a concert, the clapping of an audience after a riveting performance?

“You’re not going to die,” the person who is him in the dream says.

She shakes her head sadly.

“Sixty people already died before me. Our friends...all died.” She composes herself, builds herself up by flattening her hands on her lap and straightening. He recognizes this forced calm, seen it before as she prepares for her concerts. “If I die, but you survive this somehow, you need to live on without me.”

He grabs her wrist, gentle but tight. “You’re not going to die. You’re going to live, and we’re going to get out of here and see dad again, and we’llー” Her face blurs from unshed tears in his eyes. “We’ll go back to university and study and play in concerts again. Like always.”

But _like always_ was a thing of the past. _Like always_ became the past after five years in this facility, waitingーfor what? A chance to escape? Some hoax of an experiment to succeed?

“If you go,” he says, voice grave and on the cusp of tearing itself apart, “and I live, that doesn’t mean I’ll be happy.”

Her hand closes over his, takes it into her own. Her smile is shaky but there, radiant. He’s never understood that, her ability to smile despite the circumstances. It certainly wasn’t anything he had inherited.

“You’ll learn,” she says, loud and clear for him to hear. “You’ll adapt. It’s what you do best.”

“But I don’t _want_ to adapt.”

She laughs helplessly, wiping a tear from his eye. “And I don’t want to die.”

“Then don’t,” he says, like she has a say in the matter.

She smiles back at him, indulgent. “Alright.”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” she whispers, and this time it sounds like a lie.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth wakes from the dream crying. Somehow, he manages to not wake Linhardt, so he wipes away the tears and frees himself from the confines of the sheets, needing air. Above, the runes pulse lightly in comfort, imitating the pulse of a heartbeat he doesn’t have.

Everything secret is unearthed from the rubble he’s buried it under to become a writhing thing in the darkness. Byleth reminds himself that the only reason why he’s here now is for an end goal, a period at the end of a sentence. He isn’t supposed to be here, this is not home, this is not his to keep.

_Oh, but it could be,_ a voice in his head whispers, and he risks a glance at Linhardt, mercifully in the throes of sleep. _If it isn’t already._

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Feelings were not supposed to tangle up within their arrangement, they weren’t supposed to leave Byleth choking and breathless and trembling in the face of it. But feelings are irrational, and this one is irrational enough to become a secret, one that burrows under his skin and screams a whisper in the darkness, taunting with its call.

But there is no time, and he has no chance. This is what he thinks as he slides carefully back into bed, eyes on Linhardt’s sleeping form, hair spread on the pillow, the rise and fall of his back. This is all he can have of him, a memory.

And Byleth can live with memories.

(He’s lying, but he won’t be alive long enough to think otherwise, and Sothis is not awake to slap any sense into him.)

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“There’s something I need to give you.”

Linhardt looks up from his book - he’s reading _They Both Die at the End_ this time - and sits up on the bed, watching Byleth sift through his belongings.

“What is it?”

“When we were at Anna’s shop, I decided to buy something.”

The object, when Linhardt opens the faded plastic cover that’s too scratched up to read or make anything out, is small, square and ancient. Linhardt stares at it, running a thumb through crafted ridges and edges.

“She said it would work on the Nintendo Switch,” Byleth points out, resisting the urge to lash out and take it back under the fear that this was the wrong game after all.

Linhardt startles out of his trance. “Right. Erー” It only takes him a moment to reach for his Switch and pop in the new cartridge. Byleth relaxes at the sight of Linhardt’s face lighting up in delight. “Oh, I’ve been looking for a Pokemon Mystery Dungeon game for years! To think that it would be in Anna’s bazaar...thank you, Byleth.”

_Byleth._

It’s almost silly how flustered Byleth becomes in the face of two syllables that’s just his name being said by his favourite person. He hides a small, pleased smile behind his hand, Linhardt too preoccupied by his new game to notice. Sothis clicks her tongue at the sight of them and turns away in secondhand embarrassment.

There are a million things he could say to Linhardt now, countless secrets he could reveal with a few choice words.

Instead he manages, “It’s no problem.”

It sounds like a confession leaving his lips anyway.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The light from the projector cuts a path through the darkness, lighting the sails. The rest of the crew has settled on the main deck, on blankets and pillows and lawn chairs, the film unfolding before them on the sails.

“He was more dramatic in the book,” Linhardt murmurs as the protagonist proceeds to walk outside and cry dramatically in the rain, leaving behind a wizard having a breakdown over his new and unintentionally dyed hair and summoning wrathful demons in the house she now lives in, as one does when upset and over-dramatic and also knows magic.

Byleth pauses with his hand halfway through the popcorn bag. “Would he have destroyed the house?”

“If she didn’t return, perhaps.” Linhardt sighs and sets aside his copy of _Howl’s Moving Castle_. “I’ve always liked watching films. Seeing the things that people enjoyed working on immortalized...even if it’s not perfect, they still put it out there. And people love what they created.”

That’s the thing, isn’t it? People are so focused on creating something perfect, yet people come to appreciate the imperfections in things; the fuzziness catching something too powerful to be kept in a screen; the voice crack of an opera singer; the fact that sunsets never look the way they do when captured on camera.

_Howl’s Moving Castle_ may not be perfect in everyone’s eyes, but Byleth has watched it and other Studio Ghibli films enough times with the crew to appreciate its whimsicalness and the magic of the characters at work. It’s strange to think about: a group of people working to create a film like this, painstakingly, a step-by-step process. And those people, they dreamed of the future, too, didn’t they? They had aspirations, they were reaching for something, too. Did they imagine people watching a film they helped to create, centuries from now? Did they imagine this to be the state of the world?

Did all those people back then know that they were, in a way, being immortalized? In their art, with what they said on the internet, with group chats that are no longer active?

With the sky clear of clouds today, it allows the full moon to wink at them, a reminder of the time left. The full, red moon in the face of a lunar eclipse. Linhardt follows Byleth’s gaze.

“You know, blood moons are supposed to represent new beginnings.”

“Or endings.”

“Or endings,” Linhardt agrees, hands brushing his in the popcorn bucket, nothing more than a tingling brush and nothing more. Byleth shoves more popcorn into his mouth and shifts his focus back on the movie.

By tomorrow, they could all be dead. But that’s only if Byleth doesn’t do what he’s long resigned himself to do, the only reason why he's here in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- I was checking moon phases for when this story was taking place bc Reasons and lo and behold, there just Happened to be a fcuking blood moon on September 17 by Sheer Fcuking Chance.  
> \- Howl is such a perfect character but he’s even More of a diva and Sophie has even more spunk in the novel. It’s a short read if you have time and it offers more insight to the story from what the movie could offer  
> \- [The song Byleth played on the harp](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jLtahXcLac)


	6. Sothis simply says no thank you. she said no thanks!!! we don’t want you here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies in advance for the poem your eyes will be subjected to. The last time I wrote a sonnet was in middle school and it was 12 verses describing a cat. Yes, my writing peaked when I was in middle school
> 
> (And to ppl who see me fooling around on twitter, yes this is the same sonnet I wrote under 20 minutes. ....sorry about that)

The recording opened to a shaky closeup of a boy’s freckled nose.

_“Is itー? It’s working? Okayー”_

The camera was set down, the boy stepping back to reveal wild green curls and a white shirt that said ‘T-shirt’ in kanji. Behind him was a corkboard with a map of the world and pictures from newspapers attached with colourful pins.

A voice behind the camera said, “I think we’re good.”

“Okay.” The boy breathed in. He looked like a cross between an exhausted college student and a deranged scientist. “So, with all the information we haveーoh, wait. Hello, I’m Midoriya Izuku, and this myーmy thought process? My theory? Let’s just...get on with it. So.” He pointed at the board. “When people imagine the end of the world, they thinkーArmageddon, the apocalypse, meteors, going out in a blaze of glory, because how else would humans die if we ever would at all? But that’s not what happens, because what happened about 300 years ago is something that no one expects, and no one is looking out for, orーno. Not exactly. People were looking, but not the ones who could make a difference, not anyone who had any impact.

“The end of the world is brought on by humans themselves, becauseーclimate change. Global warming. Loss of glaciers. And without any glaciers, the world starts burning up, like overheated pizza in the microwave, and it doesn’t stop.

“So in reality, there’s no actual date for the end of the world, because it had been happening in a slow incline for some time.”

“They just didn’t stop it,” the voice behind the screen said, and Midoriya nodded.

“But there was still something we were missing. From the information Yuuei gathered, we know that the world was supposed to endーsomewhere in the year 2000, _maybe_ on the cusp of 2100. Hard maybe. But that’s not what happened, and this is what we were missing the whole time.”

The camera zoomed in to where he was pointing on the map. “What’s in Iceland?”

“Is the question no one bothered to ask. Because while the world was burning itself to a husk, and every global disaster ever was happening, no one noticed the seas parting to make space for an island moving from underwater to land, or the day the North Star - currently Polaris - went missing, or the day the world was saved by the return of Atlantis.

“Atlantis. Mythical, has plenty of stories about it, but if what submarine B has provenーvery real. Atlantis, the only place on earth that had magic and kept it to themselves, because they knew humans were greedy. The world was a mess, and throwing magic in the mix would make an even bigger mess.

“But then the humans ended up destroying the world anyway, and they all lived there, so they decided to return magic to the earth.

“Queue the time of the Great Disaster.” Midoriya waved a hand at the newspaper clippings. “We gotーtornados in China, dragons in Europe, North America and Russia suddenly trapped in snow, flooding and earthquakes and typhoons, you name it, it’s happened. Suddenly technology goes haywire, can’t communicate on phones or anything anymore! Can’t contact anyone. Everyone’s stranded, and the world’s gone to shit. And that was magic recalibrating itself with the earth once more, like it was trying to balance out all the disasters caused by humans and essentially wiping out parts of the earth.”

“Like restarting on a clean slate. Like that story with Noah’s ark.”

“Yes! Like Noah’s ark, except at some point it all died down a little, and we were left with the world as it is today. Cities underwater, plants growing larger and faster than they should, and suddenly it’s humans that need to keep up with the earth’s cycle. And it’s all because of magic and Atlantis. Yeah. Magic and Atlantis.”

The boy stared off into the distance; the camera zoomed in to the far-off, weary yet relieved look on his face that looked like a sailor lost at sea finally spotting the lighthouse.

“I’m gonna...go sleep now.”

He stumbled off-screen and fell to the floor with a loud _thump_. His hysterical laughter faded along with the screen, still on the corkboard.

Byleth stared at Linhardt’s phone. Worried, Linhardt shut it off and pocketed it.

“It’s a lot to take in,” Linhardt said, when Byleth showed no signs of moving from the bed. “And it might sound strange to you, especially since you’ve only just woken up and this could all be an elaborate joke.”

Byleth shrank back beneath the covers. “I just...I need some time to process it,” he muttered. He looked more put together than Linhardt expected him to be, but he was understandably overwhelmed.

Linhardt nodded and stood up. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Someone will come by in a few hours to check on you. Try and get some sleep. Or, I suppose you won’t be getting any more of that, since you’ve been asleep for three hundred years. I wish I could sleep for that long.”

Byleth shook his head, face pale. Maybe Linhardt shouldn’t have reminded him, but it was too late to take the words back now.

He closed the door, eyes on the book Byleth had in his lap, still open on _Subject 61_.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“You have to understand. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be doing this.”

The woman who sits beside Byleth is not _her._ She’s wearing a crisp white lab coat, her green hair tied back in a low ponytail, earnest eyes hidden behind her glasses.

“You made your choice when you decided to go through with this experiment,” Byleth finds himself saying. He doesn’t know where he is again, only that he hates this place, with white walls and bright lights. The facility. Or, no. This was never a facility in the first place, was it?

It’s a lab.

The woman doesn’t flinch at his words, but her eyes look pained, and her voice is a sliver of what it should be, steady but faint as a heartbeat.

“I didn’t want the gift of seeing into the future. You must understand this.”

“I don’t.” He doesn’t want to and doubts he will ever understand her, this woman who receives visions of the future, the one who has ruined his life and killed countless others with her experiment, this goal of hers. No, actually, he can count how many she’s killed, and the number is 61.

It’s about to become 62.

“How does it feel, knowing that you’re responsible for all those patients’ deaths? Or would you rather call them ‘subjects’?”

The blow lands. She shifts away, bundles up her papers.

“I didn’t mean for your sister to die.”

And that hurts more than anything, how simply she mentions this, as if Byleth hasn’t spent his whole life by her side, through every concert, every practice and struggle.

“As much as you didn’t mean for the sixty people before her to die,” Byleth says flatly. “Your words don’t matter. You don’t care, as long as you get your goddess, your ‘vessel’ to fulfill your stupid prophecy you’ll be happy.”

She says nothing to this, maybe because she knows trying to convince him will be a waste of time, maybe because Byleth’s right.

“This way,” she says, directing him to the door as if he has any choice.

Before he steps through, he looks her right in the eyes. “I hope that everyone you killed haunts your waking dreams and nightmares, _Rhea_ ,” he says, because she deserves none of the respect a scientist of her caliber should have.

_I hope their suffering consumes your life._

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth wakes warm and lucid and anger forming his hands into clenched fists. He unclenches them, feeling the crescent-shape marks within, and remembers that dreams cannot hurt him if he’s awake, not in any way that matters. Should matter.

Linhardt stretches, in the midst of waking, and Byleth almost reaches to turn him over in his direction, to see the scrunch of his nose and his yawn. Keyword being ‘almost.’

Everything with Linhardt has to do with _almosts_. Byleth _almost_ reaches for him. He _almost_ says the words he’s been keeping locked in his ribcage in place of his heart. He _almost_ forgets that his whole life since he woke is running on a countdown, and today it hits _zero_.

“Mornings shouldn’t exist,” Linhardt grumbles, turning to face him. There it is, the scrunch of his nose, the annoyance and the hold of sleep gradually slipping off his face.

It is Thursday, September 18th, and the world is supposed to end today if Byleth doesn’t do anything about it.

_Of course_ it would be a Thursday. What an odd day of the week. Just departed from the morose Wednesday and one step closer to Friday and the heavenly weekend that follows, Thursday is the in-between of both.

Linhardt stares back at Byleth, no doubt following his train of thought, or something of the sort, because all these months spent together but not _together_ together have built up something between them whether Byleth wanted it to or not, expected or not.

“We could run away from all of this,” Linhardt says quietly, like that is something that can be achieved, to run from the world, because it’s not too late, Byleth can still avoid his fate.

So Byleth draws away from the possibilities, from Linhardt and the warmth under the covers to begin preparing for morning, his silent answer to Linhardt’s question.

“Wait.”

Byleth’s breath stutters when Linhardt reaches out for him. It should be the most natural thing in the world - physical affection between each other. But it’s never been like this. Not like this. Usually Byleth is the one to reach out. And Linhardt only does this subconsciously in the night, finding Byleth’s arm to grasp, his hand to claim in a hold.

But his action now is purposeful, the slide of fingers against Byleth’s palm until it becomes, irrevocably, a hand tightening around his own. _Linhardt’s_ hand holding his.

There is no state of dreaming in the cosmetic force of Linhardt’s eyes. This is the action of a man fully awake, fully aware, and fully capable of taking Byleth’s life unknowingly.

(But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t let Byleth die.)

“The plants will wilt without you taking care of them. You know what that means, right?”

“What?”

“It means you have to come back.”

It is said like a vow, and Byleth nods once to let his eyes fall to the floor where Linhardt’s boots rest. Yes. He has to come back. There are harps to play, shoes to tie, people to kiss.

(Only one.)

So why, when he responds with, “Of course I’ll come back,” does it sound like a lie?

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


_They have made lies of who you used to be, and you have made yourself a liar in turn._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“You don’t have to do this,” is the first thing Edelgard says to him about the topic.

Byleth didn’t mean to, but his day was spent listless. Knowing that the end for him is near is like running that final stretch in a race with the goal in sight. But instead of winning he doesn’t get anything.

Still, he thinks, it was nice to get to see everyone one last time. They had lunch with the Golden Deer in the ex-restaurant, fighting over Bigfoot sightings and the possibility of searching for the Loch Ness monster, and no progress was made in the end. It didn’t feel like everyone was tiptoeing around him like cracked glass about to break, but no one was treating him like normal, either; Lysithea went out of her way to give him a slice of cake, Lorenz and Ferdinand swept him up in a discussion about possibly travelling to Canada (if they could get in), Leonie distracted him with a two-person board game which she won, repeatedly.

Byleth fixes his eyes on the view in the distance, the darkness tumbling towards them. He’s only seen it from a screen, heard snatches of what it looks like from people who managed to avoid it. _It really does look like an ocean’s wave._

He knows what she’s offering, the same as Linhardt this morning, an escape, an out. Because she knows better than most how it feels to be forced to do something, to not be in control of your life.

“It’s the right thing to do,” he says, and finds somewhere in himself to imitate composure, to lift up his head and meet her eyes (the latter is not a struggle. For all the might and grace she manages to carry herself with, Edelgard is quite short). Even if the right thing to do leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, like a hand outstretched left hanging with nothing to hold.

He risks a glance at Linhardt, standing with the rest of the crew gathered around Byleth. He imagines a life without him and spins a grand tale - a few months after the darkness recedes, Linhardt will accidentally save the life of a person he meets by chance on the Black Eagles’ journey, and they will join the crew and find a way into Linhardt’s heart. Byleth hopes, for their sake, that everything that follows is easy. And even if it’s not easy he’s young, the crew will manage, they’re resilient, made for flight.

(Byleth is only made for falling, and there is no one waiting at the bottom to catch him.)

“Oh, I can’tー”

Dorothea throws herself on Byleth, and Byleth clutches her in surprise, hearing her choked sob. Petra follows, face screwed up to prevent any tears, and with that most of the rest of the crew join in.

Linhardt stands still amongst it all. Byleth understands. The two of them weren’t made to last, certainly not under the deal that was made, certainly not in this universe. And they already said their goodbyes in Linhardt’s room, as hollow as Byleth’s promise was, as cold as he felt when he released himself from Linhardt’s grasp.

So Byleth takes the first step in letting go, and widens the distance between them. Out of the airship, he flies toward the darkness, because if he’s going to die today, he might as well make his death mean something for everyone else who’s still alive.

He meets the darkness head-on and is engulfed by the cold.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Linhardt had the unfortunate task of steering the airship that night. He wasn’t usually granted this job given he was more likely to fall asleep and crash the airship than lead them anywhere, but with five of their crew injured after a run-in with a giant scorpion in Venice, Italy, he hadn’t had a choice.

He spun the orb floating between his hands, the colourful runes shifting and glowing within it, and resigned himself to looking up at the night sky and counting the stars and connecting constellations.

A creak interrupted him in the midst of Ursa Major, and he paused to see a figure emerge from the hatch that led to the cabins, walking steadily up the stairs until it perched to wobble beside him on the railing.

“Can’t sleep?” Linhardt asked, eyeing the bags under Byleth’s eyes and the slump of his back, a wisp of how he imagined him to look.

“No,” Byleth answered, and paused, looking down at something in the distance, eyes shadowed, haunted. “I get strange dreams, sometimes. I don’t like them, so I try not to sleep.”

Linhardt could only imagine what it felt like to have their life uprooted, to wake feeling like you were in a different world. Everything Byleth knew had changed by the time he woke some 300 years later, and a month surely can’t be enough time to recuperate from all the changes.

It would be easy for him to recommend ways for Byleth to sleep easier, like listening to music or potions to set him into deep sleep so he could avoid the dreamsーor, perhaps a better word for them might be nightmares.

But humans are greedy and curious and contradictory, like how Bernadetta would refuse to go outside but would allow herself to be dragged outside her room by Dorothea or Ferdinand, or how all those people on the internet didn’t want anyone to know their innermost secrets but would spout about them to millions of strangers online, and Linhardt supposed they were all like Icarus, wanting to fly too close to the sun on melting candle wax wings even if they knew it would kill them.

“Why don’t you sleep in my room, then?” he suggested. “I can’t imagine the room you sleep in to be comfortableー” In fact, he remembered it being numbingly empty when he last entered, still with only a bed and that harp in an attempt to fill the spaces. “ーand my bed is quite comfortable. Though my room is a mess, you’ll have to excuse that.”

Byleth blinked rapidly. “Sleep in your room?”

“Yes.”

“With you?”

“It wouldn’t do you much good if we swapped rooms, would it? And I wouldn’t want to sleep in your bed, it doesn’t have the right sheets or a mattress.” And Linhardt was particular about his sheets and mattresses and linens and what-have-yous.

Byleth still looked hesitant, so Linhardt added, “I’m not a bad companion for sleeping. I don’t even snore.” His first sleepover with Caspar said otherwise about his sleeping habits, what with Caspar complaining about getting kicked out of the bed in the middle of the night, but Linhardt wasn’t about to say anything about that. “It’ll be like we’re getting to know each other, like a trust session. I catch you, then you catch me.”

Byleth hummed at the comparison. “Alright.”

“Alright?”

“I’ll come to your room whenever I don’t want to sleep in mine.” Byleth swatted at the air with a note of irritation, but Linhardt got the feeling the gesture wasn’t at him, but something else...beside him? Did that goddess say something? Byleth’s eyes softened imperceptibly. “Thank you.”

“It’s no trouble,” Linhardt assured him, though he had a feeling it would be trouble quite soon, because he could feel his metaphorical candle wax wings melting.

He kicked it aside to assess for later. Or, never. It’s not like this was anything to worry about in the long run, if that prophecy on the final page of the cookbook was true. This was just a way to sate his curiosity about the man for the time being.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


_Whilst civilization hastens its doom_

_Come burning and freezing eternal_

_When the end of time shall loom_

_And rise from sea a darkness infernal_

_Call upon the goddess’ return_

_A vessel she’ll need to prolong her stay_

_A body that shall not break, shall not burn_

_To protect and return the day_

_Sun and moon shall perish beneath_

_Rolling darkness that hungers for life_

_Ten titans shall rise with the darkness underneath_

_One life to be exchanged for all to survive_

_One scarlet moon but nothing more_

_To quench the thirst of mist and shadow_

_The lands shall heal over like a sore_

_The darkness returning to land below_

_With the vessel’s sacrifice will darkness cease_

_The goddess will return to the heavens and there shall be peace_

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth is made of in-betweens. He is both 24 and over 324. He likes playing the harp and hates it, because of the memories that rise back to life with each note strummed. He is trapped between the past and the present, and trying to move forward to the future he doesn’t have.

The darkness leaves no light, no air to breathe, all-consuming in its wake. _More,_ it screams, the embodiment of human greed at its worst rattling inside Byleth’s mind, trying to shatter him from the outside in. It shows images in flashes; his family as it was before, happy; the Black Eagles crew celebrating; Linhardt glancing at him on a lukewarm day, peering over a book. Byleth wishes that he could have had more of it, more time to spend with them, more of them.

_More._

“I think the words your crew would say is, ‘that’s not very cash money of you’.”

Sothis blips into existence in Byleth’s mind, glowing in the dark like those light-up shoes Caspar wears. She narrows her eyes at the images that pop up and waves them away like they’re just a pesky bug; she doesn’t share Byleth’s wishes, steadfast on her own goal.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” She huffs a sigh. “Come here.”

_Pushy._

Sothis rolls her eyes and clears her throat. “Let’s get this over with.” She doesn’t ask questions, doesn’t doubt Byleth’s decision. It had been made a long time ago, after all, and there’s no point in wasting her breath.

_More,_ the darkness screams endlessly, and Byleth peers into the darkness past it to see the people trapped and asleep in this darkness because of his indecision, his teetering tightrope thoughts.

Byleth doesn’t know what to do but he closes his eyes, and resigns himself to Sothis’ control. He thinks of a million small regrets, and a million more moments of happiness, all gone in a snap. He hears the undercurrent of magic, always there, the sound of sails billowing and further beneath still, a violin and harp playing in tandem, a song lost to a memory in time.

The next time he opens his eyes, he is not him. Stardust flows in his veins. He is made of light, lights flaring out and dying as quickly as they’re born, flickering with a candle’s lifespan from his widened worldview. He is made of the darkness of the after, the backdrop to these blinding lights.

_More,_ the darkness writhes and roils in his presence.

When he opens his mouth and speaks, it is not him who answers.

_“I think you’ve had enough, actually,”_ Sothis says through him. _“Go along home, now.”_

Byleth feels her raise his hand, a tremble emanating from it. The tremble turns into a ripple that travels outward, visible light travelling throughout the darkness like the silver lining of hope. The ripple becomes a wave, an explosion of colour and heat, and the darkness _screams_ and recoils from the force of it.

The darkness is made of human greed. Byleth can feel it, itching underneath his skin. Humans were the ones who summoned this darkness, and the world will be consumed by it.

But humans are so much more than greed, Byleth has seen it. They are compassion and kindness, indecisiveness and imperfections. Humans are as black-and-white as Byleth is as young as he is old. Don’t they deserve a second chance? Isn’t that why the Atlanteans released magic into the world in the first place? A second chance at life?

Doesn’t everyone deserve a chance at life? To learn, to grow, to live, to create, to make mistakes, to love and be loved in return? To experience the world in all its glory and all its pain?

Because in the end, humans cannot be defined by black and white, but in shades of gray.

Byleth is 24. He was part of an experiment that killed his sister and erased his memories. Sometimes, images of the past hover and overlay on his reality until he blinks them away.

_No,_ the darkness roars, the first different word it’s uttered since he’s been there, in defiance to the light.

Byleth is 24 years old. His birthday, his first to be celebrated with the Black Eagles, with anyone other than his sister and father, is in two days. Was in two days, before the end of the world.

The phantom of stars burst in his veins, burning white-hot. There’s pain everywhere along his body, even in the empty space where his heart should be, _especially_ in the empty space where his heart should be. He can feel his body rejecting his forced connection to the goddess, pushed to its limit, and prays that he can hold long enough.

Byleth is 24 years old, and he is going to save the world because of a stupid prophecy from a seer who saw the future state of the world. He is not _Subject 62_. He is _Subject 62_. He is a man made of in-betweens, on this day of in-betweens.

He blacks out.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Linhardt clutches the rails tighter like it will get Byleth to return faster, if at all. The darkness had swept over them after it had swallowed up the speck in the sky that was Byleth, and he wouldn’t know where he is if he couldn’t feel the railing under his hands, because the darkness has a way of robbing you of your senses and clawing at you, trying to break in.

He already misses him. His clandestine presence, his voice, each hum he made in reply to something Linhardt’s said. And isn’t that a thought, that he could differentiate each sound Byleth hums to a different meaning, when did they learn each other that well? For how long has Linhardt been listening, to know the difference between an amused _funny, but not enough to laugh_ and the thoughtful _I’m listening; keep going_?

But that is not enough for him. He wants to trail his hands down Byleth’s back to become familiar with the journey of it, to feel every hidden dip and curve beneath the clothing he wears. He wants to know Byleth intimately, wholly, and a year was still not enough time, a year may look and sound a lot but everyone knows that it passes in a whirlwind.

So Linhardt steadies himself on the feeling of the arrival of dawn, the phantom of Byleth’s hand in his, never to slip away again, no more lies between them, no more, no more.

(Because he heard the lie that fell from Byleth’s lips, staccato and avoiding Linhardt’s eyes as he said it, does he think Linhardt’s stupid? He knows him better than that. And he doesn’t want the last words exchanged between them to be lies, or worse, a goodbye. He hates the finality of it.)

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Byleth blinks his eyes open to a startling white, different from anything in his dreams, from the cold of the facility. This one shines down, warm and ethereal, and he is floating in the nothingness of it.

“This won’t do.”

Sothis is thereーor maybe she’s always been there? She floats with her hands on her hips, no longer glowing, but there’s something about her that looks more corporeal, blending with the background. Like she belongs here. If Byleth looks long enough, another scene filters over in blinks - a starry sky, filled with spinning cosmos and nebulae and black holes, all singing their own song - and focuses on Sothis again when his eyes burn from the sight. He understands that whatever lies beneath the veil is not for mortal eyes.

“Hm. No. I’m afraid it’s not time for you to die yet.”

_What?_

“No. Yes, I quite like this idea. This is not to be your home.” She pauses. “Yet.”

_But the prophecyー_

Sothis waves that away. “You’ve already fulfilled it, haven’t you? Your first life, gone for the sake of becoming my vessel? It’s a new century now, Byleth. And I _know_ you still have unfinished business. Besides...don’t you want a chance at living?”

He does. There’s a lot he needs to do - find the cult who summoned the darkness in the first place, return to his crew and home. And Linhardt.

“No need to thank me,” Sothis says primly, throwing her hair over her shoulder. “Consider it a loophole of sorts - you live your disgustingly domestic life, I get to sleep properly once more. I’ll be seeing you in...oh, give it a few centuries. How long _do_ humans normally live, anyway?”

She snaps her fingers, and the vision dissolves.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


Linhardt feels and sees the darkness get blown away. Before it, there’s that familiar heat that washes over him, the colour of a blue-yellow explosion, the ringing of energy. Something dredges up and collapses in on itself and explodes with a supernova force, and when Linhardt opens his eyes, he’s looking up at a clear night sky, the darkness chased away, and...

“What the fuck?” Caspar says uncomprehendingly beside him.

Stretched across the cosmos, etched into the night sky, are clouds of dust and gas, a dreamscape of red forming shapes, the world paper to their ink and art.

“It’s a nebula. It’s _two_ nebulae,” Linhardt says, even though he doesn’t understand, because nebulae are impossible to see without a telescope and they don’t form that quickly, so why, whatー

But that isn’t all. Bernadetta points up, her voice wobbling. “That’s notーis that what I think it is?”

Behind the nebulae that shouldn’t exist, the constellation of Ursa Major shines, and from it, a certain star that disappeared approximately 300 years ago.

“That’s Polaris. The North Star,” Bernadetta confirms herself, ever the crew’s navigator.

Nebulae, Linhardt remembers, can be formed from the explosion of a dying star. And there’s two nebulae right now, and Polaris is back from wherever it was, and...

He’s the first to see it, the shadow falling from the sky, a distant thing, but Linhardt knows. He would recognize that shape in darkness, in a different form, by touch and the shadow of their hands moving carefully over harp strings.

He has never been so thankful for the ‘float’ runes etched beneath his boots until today as he launches himself over the edge of the airship, taking the first step to erasing the distance between them.

  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


The wind whistles in his ears. Darkness all around, the glittering lights of a city awake below him. Byleth reorients himself and splays out midair. In the distance, he sees the shadow of the airship, and a figure, his name echoing.

_“Byleth.”_

There’s only one person who says his name like that.

“Linhardt,” he answers, the name falling unbidden from his lips. Sucks in a breath of cold air, because he's alive, _alive_ , and the knowledge of it thrums in his veins.

“I got you,” Linhardt says between his panting, arriving to float below him, arms outstretched, and Byleth braces himself for what can only be a rough collision.

They are two planets colliding, spinning, pulling at each other with their own gravity and sending everything tumbling, whirling around them. Byleth finds himself with a grasp of Linhardt’s hand, steadies himself and uses his own magic to pull them upright before they’re sent to the ground.

Linhardt presses his forehead against his and sighs against him, eyelashes fluttering on Byleth’s cheekbones.

“You caught me,” Byleth says, blank-faced as ever, just a bit cheeky when he says it.

Linhardt’s laugh is a huff of breath pounding on Byleth’s lips. “I did. And you’re alive.”

“I am.” Byleth reaches to place a hand on the back of Linhardt’s neck, feels goosebumps rise and settle quickly, feels his own goosebumps form when Linhardt presses closer in a sigh, hand settling on the curve of his jaw.

Linhardt is the one to close the distance between them, stealing away Byleth’s next breath with his lips on his. It’s a tinge desperate, and their noses bump and hands tangle in hair but Byleth sinks into it because before this he didn’t know how much a kiss could feel like being welcomed home.

“Byleth,” Linhardt breathes when they part, “This is going to sound silly, but I think we were made for beginnings.”

“I think we were made for each other,” Byleth says, and he means it in the most imperfect of ways, in the quiet talks of night and the lucidness of morning, in the dishevelled disaster of Linhardt’s room and the oddity that is Byleth’s existence.

Because here is something they don’t tell you when it’s the end of the world:

Sometimes, the cosmic alignment of the universe will set two people from two different centuries of two different countries who aren’t meant to exist within the same breath of each other _but they will_ , because sometimes?

The universe gets it right.

“Let’s go home,” Linhardt says, and Byleth hums and holds him closer like their bodies can meld and become one and spends a moment more looking up at their nebulous sky.

“Home,” Byleth echoes, and Linhardt nods and draws away but doesn’t part; he stays holding Byleth’s hand.

(Come morning, the nebulae will disappear from the sky, an illusion of magic, a gift from the heavens and a certain goddess herself.)

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


In the morning, Linhardt tangles his hand in Byleth’s hair and doesn’t pull away. Byleth stays nestled under his chin, listening to the stutter of Linhardt’s heartbeat, fascinated by every beat.

Linhardt grumbles, and Byleth peeks up at his expression, at closed eyes, still half-asleep. He smiles, leaning up to kiss him on the forehead.

“Good morning.”

“No such thing,” Linhardt mutters, but opens his eyes.

“Every morning is good if I wake up next to you.”

Linhardt sits up, Byleth rolling off him. “If you say anything else that sappy, I’m going toー” He sighs, because he can’t confess to wanting to kill Byleth even now. Byleth lies down on his lap.

“You’re the one who said we were made for beginnings first,” Byleth deadpans.

Linhardt huffs and pushes him off the start the day. It’s a miracle: Linhardt out of bed before Byleth. Not even the possibility of the end of the world brought this about.

From his view on the bed, Byleth sits back and watches Linhardt change, no longer feeling the urge to look away as Linhardt slips out of his pyjamas to his regular outfit. In turn, Linhardt watches Byleth with an appreciative gaze, occasionally trailing from his phone to him.

“I think this is the earliest I’ve gotten out of bed.”

“It’s...around the same time,” Byleth says. The clock’s red digits read 7:30am.

“Let’s just go. We can have breakfast. Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes. Or...no. Stay there.” Byleth drops down to lift Linhardt’s leg up, his shoe on his thigh, and begins tying the laces together.

“Oh. Was that bothering you this whole time?”

“Yes.”

Linhardt’s smile is small and secretive, and Byleth tilts his head questioningly but Linhardt only shakes his head and Byleth returns to tying shoelaces until Linhardt brings up another topic.

“I can’t get used to your hair.”

Byleth pauses to look up at Linhardt, having moved on to Linhardt’s other boot.

“To be fair, Sothis didn’t mention it during our last conversation,” Byleth says. “Does it look bad?”

Linhardt reaches forward to pinch a strand between his fingers, letting it fall away as he lies back on the bed.

“I think it suits you.”

Byleth finishes tying Linhardt’s boot and sets his foot down to stare up at Linhardt. Linhardt is slow to pull up and reach forward, to place his hands on either side of Byleth’s face to cup. Byleth leans into the touch, hands wrapping Linhardt’s wrists, drinking in his presence and the simple happiness that comes with simply _being_.

“Let’s go,” Linhardt whispers, and Byleth pulls himself and Linhardt to his feet, remaining where they were until they meet halfway to kiss.

When they walk out their room, their hands remain linked, and they stay close, and Byleth’s mind sinks into the possibilities of _togetherness_ and the problems of today that he’s alive to have.

Because as much as he doesn’t want to think about it, something - more specifically, someone - caused that darkness, that greed and malice to form, which means that their crew has a cult to destroy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- The ten titans mentioned in the prophecy are just a nod to [GD spoilers up ahead] ten elites/generals or whatever that are summoned along with Nemesis, but I was Not about to have them fight ten of those  
> \- The nebulae mentioned were inspired by the Heart and Soul nebulae
> 
> And that’s it. Wow, you made it! Thanks for reading :) now you’ll have to excuse me bc I need to go write the actual part 1 of this series (which is highkey a tododeku rapunzel au) before I can get to part 3. There are ships to cry over and bastards pretending to be kings to yeet down dramatically long towers. Peace out

**Author's Note:**

> A list of things of this world that aren’t important but Are a thing:  
> \- Mt Everest is no longer the tallest mountain in the world. It got hit by a meteorite and a chunk of it is missing  
> \- Russia and Canada are locked in eternal winter, but no one has been able to enter and (as far as everyone else knows) leave Canada  
> \- The Black Plague returned and killed 60% of the population of Europe. Then Europe got infested with dragons  
> \- Flooding and rise of sea levels means the amount of land there actually is smaller than before. So a lot of countries are small (like Japan), and the Philippines has less islands  
> \- America’s under eternal lockdown for a zombie outbreak. They are the only country with a zombie outbreak. Survivors include cowboys and girl scouts. They are under the impression the rest of the world is in the same state (it is not)  
> \- Japan was ruled by a dumbass king for a century or two but he was killed two years ago by his family. This is part 1 of the series that I started back in 2016
> 
> Side notes for this fic specifically:  
> \- The BE airships is actually an upgraded version. Not sure who cares about this info but the earlier version of airships had pulleys and pedals and an actual Wheel for Steering. This one just has an orb that connects to the battery in the engine room. Airships float via runes; you’re supposed to stick your personalized rune on to the battery and it siphons off your energy to fly. This is why it’s best to have a large crew (recommended 10+) but if your ship is small (as BE’s is) you should be fine.


End file.
